Celtic Tiger’s prints leave blemishes

Donal Hickey on developers’ failure to deliver services.

THE roar of the Celtic Tiger may no longer be heard in the land but the prints of its paws are everywhere.

While some people benefited handsomely from the get-rich-quick years, many others are now paying the price for developments that were allowed to proceed without having necessary services, including roads, water and sewage schemes, public lighting, footpaths and children’s play areas.

Landowners made fortunes but didn’t have to a pay a fraction of what it actually costs to service developments.

Now that the builders have gone away, however, others are being left to pick up the tab and, as usual, it’s the taxpayers who will have to dig deep.

The issue was recently highlighted by the president of the Irish Planning Institute (IPI), Andrew Hind, who said the combined effect of our planning and taxation systems seems to have been to facilitate the making of vast personal and corporate fortunes by landowners and developers. At the same time, many developments lacked basic social and physical infrastructure and transport.

While the State and local authorities have to produce vast sums of money to remedy the problem, landowners and developers appear to be immersed in colossal one-off windfall profits.

The planning system was never intended to give a higher priority to the making of private fortunes than to the provision of basic social and physical services for people, Mr Hind told the IPI national planning conference, in Westport, Co Mayo. He called for an urgent revision of the system of contributions developers and landowners have to pay.

“To cope with our growing population, developers should be required to pay more towards the cost of providing schools, public water and sewage facilities, roads and footpaths and public transport infrastructure,” he suggested.

Mr Hind pointed out that the Town and Regional Planning Act 1934 — the country’s first planning legislation — allowed local authorities to demand that those whose land and property benefited from new public infrastructure should pay 75% of the value added to their land or property back to the authority within a year of being required to do so.

However, today’s planning legislation has an entirely different emphasis, with local authorities now only entitled to seek a “contribution” towards the cost of infrastructure which benefits the land being developed rather than seeking a share in the value of the development potential created.

“The problem we face today,” said Mr Hind, “is that, in most local authorities, the revenue arising from development contributions is nothing like enough to pay for the level of infrastructure spending required in the area.

“Developers and landowners are not paying a large enough share of the cost of properly servicing their development.”

During recent years of economic growth, individual interests too often won out in battles against the common good, he added.

Examples where the common good has not been successfully protected, despite the best efforts of planners, included: proliferation of large one-off houses around the countryside; indiscriminate rezoning of land at locations that are inappropriate and against planners’ advice; loss, or the threat of loss, of unique and irreplaceable assets such as archaeological resources, special areas of conservation, scenic landscapes or views; out-of-control growth of private car-based mobility; and, once people left the main national routes, our roads were much the same as they were 70 or 80 years ago, but were carrying 21st century traffic volumes.

In many areas, Mr Hind continued, there was a failure to deliver proper education facilities, particularly primary schools, in tandem with new development. This was a critical failing, particularly for a nation that attributes much of its recent economic success and its hopes for the future on the knowledge economy.

“We’ve also failed to deliver a sustainable transport system to meet the needs of our economy and the communities it supports,” he added.

“This is perhaps the most potentially devastating failure because of the impact of transport-related emissions on our strategy towards climate change.”

Addressing planners from all over the country, he said, “Revising our system for development contributions so that developers and landowners pay more and the State pays less should be an urgent national priority.”

He believed such an overhaul of the system for contributions would secure for the community a greater share in the windfall profits made when land is zoned or planning permission is granted; ensure that infrastructure was provided when it was needed; and stabilise land prices.