Housing charity calls for review of Irish planning system

LEADING housing charity Respond! has called for an independent review of the country’s planning system in the wake of a survey that revealed more than 2,800 unfinished housing estates nationwide.

The charity’s spokeswoman Aoife Walsh said that while the banks were undoubtedly drivers of the property bubble, the planning system had also played a part and should not escape scrutiny.

“Without doubt, the banks were a key player, but there would not have been the same demand for credit to purchase land or property had zonings and planning permission not been so easily available,” Ms Walsh said.

Her comments came in the wake of the publication by the Government of the National Survey of Ongoing Housing Developments which found that more than 23,000 housing units are completed but vacant and that the figures in Cork County and Dublin city are particularly stark. In Cork county, of 18,861 dwellings included in the survey, just 7,493 were completed and occupied, while 2,681 were complete but vacant. In Dublin city, of 13,078 dwellings included in the survey, less than 6,000 were completed and occupied, while 2,536 were complete but vacant.

Ms Walsh said the figures showed “complete failure of our planning system during the past decade” and that “ghost estates are the legacy we must all live with”.

She said the Government should not have introduced tax incentive schemes “that led to crazy development in areas where there was never any housing need”.

“An independent review of the entire system should be undertaken, similar to the recent reports on banking and financial regulation. Our property and banking sectors are inextricably linked together and both have failed due partly to lack of proper regulation,” Ms Walsh said.

Cork Fine Gael TD Deirdre Clune said unfinished estates and ghost estates were “a personal tragedy for those families who bought homes in what they believed would be fully functioning communities” but are “increasingly... the location of choice for anti- social behaviour”. Ms Clune said these estates stood “as monuments to the greed of some bankers and developers and the incompetence of the current Government”.

Sinn Féin spokesperson on the environment Martin Ferris called on the Government to reallocate some empty houses in ghost estates to people on local authority housing lists.

“In my own county there are currently about 1,000 people on the county council’s housing waiting list, which doesn’t include the 2,000 people in Tralee and the 200 people in Listowel who have a need for housing. This report has identified 675 houses in Kerry that are complete but unoccupied. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out where at least a partial solution lies,” Mr Ferris said.

Hubert Fitzpatrick, Construction Industry Federation director of housing and planning, said the survey’s figures “point to approximately eight to nine months housing supply in some parts of the country and will hopefully put an end to confusion about numbers of new vacant housing units”.

Fine Gael housing spokesman Terence Flanagan accused the Government of putting off real solutions by creating another taskforce to come up with a blueprint for local authorities on best practice in dealing with unfinished estates.