Scarcely a day goes by when the planning system is not in the headlines, and never in a good way. For several years now, the overwhelming consensus has been that our planning system is not fit for purpose and a bureaucratic noose inhibiting all of our best-laid housing and infrastructure ambitions. This viewpoint has now become so widely entrenched that it is almost impossible to push back against.
But is it justified?
Official statistics show that of the approximately 30,000 planning applications submitted in 2022, 87% were granted permission. 60% of these decisions were made within eight weeks, with an average decision making time of fourteen weeks. Approximately two-thirds of all permissions were for housing, with over 217,000 units permitted over the past five years. In the same period, just 128,000 units were commenced with 110,000 completed.
Despite the endless drumbeat of negativity, it is clear that the statistics simply don’t support the narrative that the planning system is broken. For the vast majority of applicants, the system works perfectly well, even if the eventual decision is sometimes not what is hoped for. Certainly, when it comes to housing supply, all of the units required have been consistently permitted, and typically at a rate significantly outpacing that of actual commencements.
Critics will, of course, point to the well-documented delays at An Bord Pleanála which has, of late, been the subject of some very serious controversies. However, less than 8 percent of all planning applications are appealed to An Bord Pleanála, which has a statutory objective to dispose of cases within eighteen weeks. In 2022, the average decision making time was about twenty-five weeks (up from approximately nineteen weeks in 2021, before the current controversies) with almost half of all cases being determined within the statutory objective period.
It is also true, however, that there are statistics, damn lies and statistics, and averages don’t tell the whole story. There are regrettably too many cases, particularly in renewable energy, transport and other strategic infrastructure projects, where decisions are currently taking far too long. The recent meltdown at An Bord Pleanála is the major cause, resulting in a backlog of cases awaiting decision.
Judicial review has also been fingered as a significant source of delays. However, despite its near-hysterical prominence in public debate, judicial review remains a relatively rare phenomenon. Less than 600 such cases have been taken in the past decade, with the uptick in recent years almost exclusively associated with the short-lived and disastrous Strategic Housing Development process. Now that this has thankfully been abandoned, the initial evidence suggests that judicial reviews against housing developments are falling rapidly.
So, if the planning system is not broken, why are we fixing it?
Unfortunately, scapegoating planning regulation for wider policy failures has a long history, with the property lobby a past master in propagating this narrative. One must only look across the water to the UK for an example of this, where planning has been in a near perpetual, chaotic state of vacillating reform and counter-reform. And, sadly, Ireland now seems poised to follow suit.
Minister Darragh O’Brien insists that the regulatory overhaul included in the Planning & Development Bill 2023 is essential to increase clarity, consistency and confidence in the planning system. This is despite his own Regulatory Impact Statement concluding that the current legislation is “considered to be working efficiently and is well understood”. While the new bill has been loudly trumpeted as the most radical revision of planning for a generation, the reality is that it is nothing of the sort. For the most part it is simply a recodification of the existing laws and for most users, they will notice little, if any, real change.
However, hidden within the detail of the bill are some extremely problematic and regressive amendments, particularly to public participation and access to justice. These are no doubt a sop to a property industry whom, stung by a series of high profile reversals in the courts, have been vocally demanding limits to judicial review (although not of course their own access to the courts). However, hard cases make very bad laws. At the Oireachtas Pre-Legislative Scrutiny hearings, witness after witness, including seasoned legal experts, implored that upending settled judicial review rules now will simply result in further litigation and inevitable delays.
It is hard to imagine a more wanton act of self-harm to achieving our pressing housing, climate and infrastructure targets than what is being proposed. In addition, a whole slew of new secondary regulations will also be required alongside a brand new national planning policy architecture and the need for the upskilling and retraining of planning staff. Given the chronic lack of resources and underfunding within the system, implementation could only be on a gradual phased basis. It could take the best part of a decade to get back on an even keel. Even with the best will in the world, contradictions and omissions will inevitably emerge in the practical operation of the new legislation, causing ever more confusion, conflict and delay.
Our planning system does not require reform. What we need to do is to stop deforming it. The institutional collapse at An Bord Pleanála did not just happen. It was an entirely predictable and direct consequence of short-sighted legislative meddling and regulatory capture by developer interests. And now we’re doing it again. Unless we are willing to learn these lessons, one thing is absolutely certain – the first item on the agenda once the new bill is enacted will be the question of the urgent need for planning reform.
Why does planning always fail? This is a question that has preoccupied academics for decades, but rarely reflected upon by practitioners. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, we all knew that planning had failed, and spectacularly so. When the bubble burst, Ireland was littered with every manner of idiotic development. The failure was plain for all to see. Yet, unreflective, planners carried on regardless, seemingly determined not to acknowledge what they had been part of.
The usual way planners justify this perennial failure is to claim that it is always someone else’s fault. If only there was more political commitment, more support, better legislation etcetera, things would have been different. Planning must always be good as everyone is generally for it. So, if we just try harder it cannot be anything other, sanctifying the process, regardless of its continuously bad outcomes. This is why planning fails. It simply refuses to learn lessons from experience.
Deregulation Redux
So why does this matter now? It matters because it leaves us blind to what is actually happening in the context of the so called reforms proposed in the Planning & Development Bill 2022. Recall what happened in 2010 after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. There was a widespread backlash against the deregulatory groupthink that had overrun society. The notion of ‘bad planning’ entered public discourse and there was a determination that the chaotic, developer-led market frenzy must never be allowed happen again.
But they never went away. Slowly over the subsequent years, in tandem with the fire sale of bailed-out development land assets to international capital, the deregulationists stealthily got to work, one by one unpicking measures designed to prevent the mistakes of the past. First to go in 2014 was the 80% windfall tax on profits from the sale of rezoned land, briefly introduced as an anti-speculation measure. Next was the publication of the ill-fated ‘Rebuilding Ireland’ policy with its promise of a ‘root and branch’ review of the planning system. This gave us the disastrous fast-track Strategic Housing Development process written ‘lock, stock and barrel‘ by property industry lobbyists.
The revanchist coup de grâce, however, was the introduction in 2018 of Specific Planning Policy Requirements allowing An Bord Pleanála to centrally overrule locally agreed development policies. There had already been a provision in planning law to allow the Minister to do this. But Section 29 of the Planning Act requires the approval of both houses of the Oireachtas. Obviously, such democratic oversight would simply not do, so the law was rewritten to effectively allow the Minister to govern by fiat.
The consequences of this heady deregulatory cocktail need little rehearsal here. As I have written before, it metastasized through the planning system like a cancer resulting in a surge of litigation and ultimately to the near total implosion of An Bord Pleanála itself, the resignation of its chairperson and the unprecedented criminal conviction of its deputy chairperson. Planning inspectors spoke of their “anguish” that their professional integrity had been dragged through the mud by “a small number of select individuals”.
I think it is fair to say that the Irish planning profession has never faced a crisis like this. But fear more! Ever calculating, deregulationists always fail forward, never wasting the opportunity of a crisis (that they themselves created) to continue their Machiavellian ideological crusade.
Ireland does not have a strong tradition of right-leaning think tanks, such as in the UK, but we do have our own coterie of obstreperous anti-planning pseudo-pundits whom, radicalised by market-centric ‘YIMBY’ discourses emanating from pro-investor lobbyists, such as the Centre for Cities, remorselessly push the apocryphal rhetoric that the root cause of our housing supply crisis must always be planning regulation.
The latest wheeze amongst deregulationists, for example, is that it is Ireland’s ‘UK style discretionary planning system’ that is the problem, pushing instead for ‘by right’ zoning where effectively no development consent would be required at all. Needless to say, the fact that such harebrained proposals stand absolutely no chance of being implemented is beside the point. In true Friedmanian fashion, the objective is not actually to succeed, but to continuously beat the drum that planning regulation must always be to blame. And the best way to keep that idea lying around in the public consciousness is through advancing ever more extreme ultra-libertarian proposals, actually positing them as rational reforms that are both logical and appropriate, and even that they have widespread support.
The primary objective of this relentless campaign is to overwhelm political debates such that anyone who challenges this marketised, supply-side vision can simply be dismissed as a ‘NIMBY’ ‘blocking’ new homes and driving up prices. This, of course, is habitually buttressed by all the usual tired Pavlovian caricatures of planning as a failed top-down socialist, Stalinist or Soviet-style command and control bureaucracy which stifles supply, accompanied by an alarmist invective of an archaic, unreformed ‘regime’ responsible for a whole range of negative social and economic consequences.
These incessant anti-planning barrages ensure that the public gaze is forever averted from the fact that, as has been discussed above, the planning system has already been captured wholesale by these self-same, self-serving deregulatory interests, actually causing the current crisis. The supreme irony here is that, while the government proudly pronounces that the new Planning Bill represents ‘the largest overhaul of the planning system in decades’, the reality is that in recent years it has been subject to a near constant state of restless market-driven radical reforms.
Indeed, it is this perpetual legislative meddling, resulting in increasing complexity, confusion, uncertainty, litigation, delays and a constant atmosphere of criticism and crisis, that creates the very conditions that deregulationists thrive upon, fuelling a vicious circle of anti-planning rhetoric and fomenting increasing demands for further liberalised supply-side reforms.
Of course, none of these reforms have ever actually boosted housing supply nor addressed the problem of house price inflation. This is because that is not their purpose. Rather the aim is to turn planning into an accessory of global property market speculation, or what Bradley calls ‘the supply-side of land financialisation’, where capitalising on the land value uplifts achieved through the planning process is a structural imperative.
When these reforms inevitably fail to deliver, rather than questioning their underlying premise, new deregulatory denouncements are made of a planning system ‘not fit for purpose’ which, through its forcible reiteration, has become deeply ensconced in the national mood. Unfortunately nobody ever asks–whose purpose? And if the system is not fit for purpose–who made it so?
Standing Up
Against the backdrop of this sustained, demoralising scapegoating of planning’s utility, validity and legitimacy, it is little wonder that many planners have become pessimistically resigned to internalising the basic premise that they are in fact the problem. It’s now almost impossible to get a positive message of the value of planning covered in the media. Instead planners must forever be engaged in a desperate rearguard attempt to explain away their failures. And unfortunately there is no shortage of acquisitive accomplices from within the planning profession itself, often employing lofty academic titles to tout their authority, to happily administer the perfidious onslaught.
The problem is that planners have typically not been educated to understand how the urban political economy really works and how the planning system has essentially been co-opted as an instrument of property market growth, displacing it from its long-term public interest goals at the cost of the delivery of affordable new homes. Speaking out is professionally dangerous and those who do often face reprisal. As a result, planning has become largely a silenced profession with most practitioners seeing no other option but to obediently toe the line rather than to give voice to their own professional, moral or ethical judgments.
But there are some tentative grounds for hope. A growing coalition of professional, environmental and civil society actors have now mobilised to warn against the government’s proposed Planning Bill. Prior to the former Attorney General going into secret conclave with a select elite advisory group to personally recast the entire planning code, there had been no clamour within the profession for such a radical overhaul. The legislation is not included in the current Programme for Government and no explanatory memorandum has ever been published to explain why the changes are actually needed. As expected, the Planning Advisory Forum, established to provide broad-based consultative input into the legislation, offered a mere legitimating fig leaf and never saw sight nor sound of the draft Bill before it was published.
Naturally, after years of bungled, unwieldy reforms and counter-reforms, some sensible recodification, simplification and consolidation of the legislation is now in order. However, this is not the real intent of the Bill. Nothing in the draft legislation will change the basic fundaments of how the planning system works. Rather, its true purpose is to provide a Trojan Horse for the time-honoured deregulatory obsession with speeding-up consenting timelines and dramatically curtailing public participation, particularly in respect of the bane of the real estate industry–judicial review.
Lest there be any doubt; if this legislation is enacted as currently drafted, it is a recipe for complete chaos. There are simply not enough planning resources to manage such abridged timelines, nor is there likely to be. We need to draw the lessons from the Strategic Housing Development fiasco. Mandatory timelines are a disaster. Despite its perceived complexity, the current legislation is familiar to those operating it and for the most part it works perfectly well. Ripping it up now and starting from scratch will destroy this accumulated institutional knowledge.
Even with the best will in the world, contradictions and omissions will inevitably emerge in the practical operation of the legislation causing ever more conflict, dysfunction and delay. This will be no more so than in relation to the centrepiece of the Bill – the swingeing restrictions to access to justice. At the Oireachtas Pre-Legislative Scrutiny hearings, witness after witness, including seasoned legal experts, implored that upending settled judicial review rules now will result in endless litigation and constitutional challenges. This will invariably involve lengthy references to the European Court of Justice, severely impeding many critical development projects via satellite litigation. Predictably the government will lose, necessitating ever more legislative upheaval.
It is hard to imagine a more gratuitous, debilitating act of self-harm to achieving our pressing housing, climate and public infrastructure needs than what is being proposed. Secondary regulations will also be required alongside a whole new national planning policy architecture. It could take the best part of a decade to get back on an even keel. Even the property industry, after years of lobbying for the legislation, have now belatedly recognised the danger and called for it to be paused. But this is a battle the government feels ideologically compelled to fight, regardless the consequences. Of course, when it all goes horribly wrong, the planning system will be blamed once more, and the failures used as an excuse to push for even more regressive deregulatory changes.
Somebody needs to shout stop. Our planning system does not require ‘reform’. What we need to do is to stop deforming it! This must begin with a new national conversation that explicitly recognises that the market absolutely cannot deliver the future we need. Instead, we require more planning, more participation, not less, and a paradigmatic shift from a system based on ‘planning for capital’, beholden to developers, to one based on ‘planning for society’ and the people that it is meant to serve.
It’s almost hard to believe it now but, at one time, An Bord Pleanála was perhaps the only stand-up institution in the Irish planning system. Throughout the Celtic Tiger, it regularly sent packing some of the most egregious developments permitted by local planning authorities. Its reach was far from perfect, of course. Nationally, An Bord Pleanála reviews fewer than 10% of all planning applications on appeal, leaving its then outgoing chairman in 2011, John O’Connor, bitterly regretting that it could not have done more to take a stronger stand against the worst excesses of the property bubble and its calamitous consequences.
Nevertheless, its rulings did have a significant disciplining effect in setting precedents as a bulwark against the ‘all development is good development’ madness that gripped the Celtic Tiger. An Taisce, for example, previously noted that of the approximately 2,000 appeals it lodged over the ten-year period to 2008, 80% were upheld. And while An Bord Pleanála’s decisions regularly raised the hackles of local politicians, it was one of the few bodies that emerged from the Celtic Tiger with its reputation and good name largely intact and proof positive that, when removed from the malign influence of political clientelism and short-term local development concerns, planners and the planning system could make enlightened, impartial decisions, without fear or favour, for the common good and in the long-term public interest.
Unfortunately, those days are now long gone. The gamekeeper has turned poacher. Today, An Bord Pleanála has become a byword for ineptitude, and its reputation for probity, integrity and neutrality lies in tatters, at least in the minds of many in the public. It gives me no satisfaction to write that and I wish it were otherwise. But for any planner, to watch the fall from grace of this unique institution from its former position of authority at the apex of the planning system should be a matter of deep regret, profound concern and, yes, even anger. It is not An Bord Pleanála’s fault, needless to say, but the consequence of a decade where Fine Gael has single-mindedly pursued an ideological obsession with centralising planning governance at the behest of property developers and to speed-up the consenting process by bypassing local planning authorities, turning it from a largely appellate body to a national planning authority of the first instance, a role which it is uniquely unsuited or resourced for.
Back in 2016, when Fine Gael launched the now-defunct Rebuilding Ireland, I apprehensively blogged on the likely adverse implications for the planning system, and particularly the centrepiece of the reforms, the now soon to be abandoned fast-track Strategic Housing Development (SHD) system, whereby planning applications for largescale residential developments of one-hundred units or more would be made direct to An Bord Pleanála and where decisions were required to be made in just sixteen weeks. I wrote:
“The idea that adequate consideration could be given to such proposals, while fulfilling all requirements pursuant to EU and national law, within these compressed timeframes and without recourse to seeking further environmental or technical information or giving adequate consideration to local concerns or right of appeal, is a recipe for yet another great planning disaster.”
Regrettably, all my fears came to pass, and then some. It wasn’t difficult to predict. The SHD system can only be described as an utter omnishambles, severely eroding public confidence in the planning system and resulting in an upsurge in judicial reviews as the only means to challenge decisions. Tracking data compiled by solicitor, Fred Logue, shows that of the forty SHD judicial reviews decided so far, An Bord Pleanála has successfully defended just three (eight were withdrawn). Forty-five others are pending. According to its most recent annual report, An Bord Pleanála has shelled out over €8 million in legal fees, out of a total operating expenditure of €31 million. That’s right, a quarter of its annual budget! In fact, given the scale of its reversals, almost half of its legal expenditure was to pay the legal costs of those who took proceedings against it.
To make matters worse, in a very serious recent development, its deputy chairperson and head of the SHD division, Paul Hyde, whom, it is reported, once co-owned a yacht (called ‘Dark Angel’) with Minister Simon Coveney and subsequently appointed by former Minister Phil Hogan, is now under investigation over multiple allegations of conflict of interest, including charges that he granted planning permission for a development owned by his brother and sister-in-law which he did not declare. In the meantime, An Bord Pleanála has been forced to undertake an audit of hundreds of decisions made by Mr. Hyde to ensure there are no further possible improprieties. If the current investigation launched by Minister O’Brien bears out these accusations, GUBU doesn’t adequately cover it.
I do not think it is any exaggeration to say that the legacy of this period in An Bord Pleanála’s history will be looked back upon with similar disdain to that of Robert Moses infamous, hubristic attempts to reconstruct New York in the early 20th Century. No longer able to simply ride roughshod over planning regulation, as had been the case throughout the Celtic Tiger, the solution for development capital in the post-Celtic Tiger period was simple—regulatory capture. Particularly in Dublin, and spurred on by Fine Gael’s unctuous kowtowing to the property industry—such as the swingeing retrenchment of apartment size and building height regulations alongside NAMA’s fire sale of development land—has seen the rubber-stamping by An Bord Pleanála of tens of thousands of Build-to-Rent (BTR) units across the city to the extent that they comprised over 80% of all residential schemes applied for or granted in 2020 — a situation which even Dublin City Council supremo, Eoin Keegan, recently described as totally “unsustainable” and with the potential to have, “significant long-term adverse impacts on the housing needs of the city”.
Perhaps the supply-at-all-costs zeal of An Bord Pleanála would be justified if it had any effect on… well, supply. But as of February 2022, figures compiled by the Dublin Democratic Planning Alliance show that, of the approximately 70,000 SHD units permitted to date, commencement notices had been submitted for just 13,000. What is most alarming, however, is not just the regulatory capture, but the level of ideological capture and the extent to which An Bord Pleanála has unthinkingly imbibed the kool-aid and the ‘obvious truth’ of the mainstream neoclassical economics dogma that flooding the city with hundreds of permissions for overpriced, elite shoebox tenements will somehow miraculously result in more housing supply at lower, more affordable costs. Contrary to the economist media doyens of the development industry, it won’t.
As described by Professor Manuel Aalbers: “The empirical evidence invalidates the economic truism that oversupply must lead to declining prices and that rising prices are a result of undersupply”. The reason is quite simple and not really very difficult to comprehend—real estate developers and the financial and political system, more generally, have no interest in falling property prices and will only increase supply to the extent that it will not depress market prices. Unwittingly, all An Bord Pleanála has achieved in its craven abandonment of progressive planning values is to become a useful appendage to the development industry in the speculative, rentier assetization of property values or what Architect Alan Mee coins the ‘planning-industrial complex’, or in old money, an ‘urban growth machine’. I do not believe any self-respecting planner signed up for that.
At last year’s Housing Agency’s Annual Conference, An Bord Pleanála’s Director of Planning, Rachel Kenny, predictably defended An Bord Pleanála’s administration of the SHD system and, while on the one hand acknowledging that judicial reviews affected less than 10% of SHD housing units and that public opposition to new housing developments had not changed much in the past 15-20 years, on the other lamented that planning applications had become more adversarial with high levels of opposition, a situation which she described as unusual in Europe, justifying further legal and planning reform, and even parroting the development industry line that the only reason for increasing numbers of judicial reviews is because ‘objectors’ get a free ride on costs.
The lack of self-awareness here was quite staggering. There was no introspection whatsoever of the fact that An Bord Pleanála had lost pretty much every SHD judicial review taken against it or, less still, of the quality of the units being permitted. Instead, specific opposition to high-volume, low-quality BTR units was lumped into a generalised opposition to ‘housing’. Ms. Kenny rhetorically asks, “Who speaks for future residents…those that need homes?”. The answer is, An Bord Pleanála does! Fair enough, they might counter that it is simply applying ministerial guidelines. But as Mr Justice Humphreys wrote in one judgement on an SHD application:
“The clear language of the ministerial guidelines sends the message that the reasonable exercise of planning judgement requires that an enthusiasm for quantity of housing has to be qualified by an integrity as to the quality of housing. Among other obvious reasons, and speaking about developments generally rather than this one particularly, such an approach reduces the prospect of any sub-standard, cramped, low-daylight apartments of today becoming the sink estates and tenements of tomorrow.”
It’s a sad indictment when a High Court judge exercises more planning foresight and agency than An Bord Pleanála. But here we are.
The reality is that, despite what is constantly reported in the media, there is very little fundamental or widespread public opposition to new housing developments in Ireland. The increase in judicial reviews in recent years simply directly mirrors the growing frequency in cases where decisions by An Bord Pleanála overrule agreed statutory development plans, which have been consulted upon with local communities and adopted by their local elected representatives. This is a situation that is unusual in Europe. Take, for example, the controversial Holy Cross College SHD development in Dublin of 1,614 BTR units comprising 70% tiny studios and one-beds. Here the local planning authority, Dublin City Council, expressed ‘alarm’ at what was being proposed but, despite its strenuous opposition, An Bord Pleanála simply went ahead and granted it anyway, using ‘Specific Planning Policy Requirement’ legislative directives introduced by former Fine Gael minister Eoghan Murphy to override democratically determined local development policy.
One has to ask what is the point in engaging in detailed public consultation and planning exercises to achieve consensus amongst all stakeholders on what is envisaged for a local area, only for it to be summarily ignored? It should come as no surprise, in these circumstances, that people seek access to the courts to challenge these decisions, as their only recourse to this breach of contract. Indeed, Dublin City Council has even had to take An Bord Pleanála to court on two separate occasions to defend the integrity of its development plan. Yet still, of the 381 SHD applications determined to date, just 84 have been subject to judicial review (22%). Overall, a tiny fraction of housing developments permitted nationally is subject to judicial review. Tens of thousands of units have been granted without any legal challenge whatsoever and are, in principle, ready to go—although, you would not know this by reading the pages of the national newspapers.
But here is the crux. The truth hardly matters. Just like in 2016, instituting a self-perception of failure amongst planners through constant criticism to generate a self-governed desire amongst them to adherently ingratiate their values to better meet short-term political objectives of governing ideologies, the same is happening again today. Neoliberalism fails forward, achieving its goals by whatever means necessary, often capitalising upon its own chronic failures to implement ever more regressive and anti-democratic planning ‘reforms’. Recently, for example, Minister for Planning, Peter Burke of Fine Gael has been out on the stump decrying the rise in judicial reviews, which are a direct consequence of changes to planning laws, including the SHD system, which his own party introduced! He quotes business groups who are telling him that the number of judicial reviews is “frightening”, insisting that “it’s so important that we have business leaders, business voices to the forefront”. The level of gaslighting here is again quite something. Before the introduction of SHD, you could count the number of judicial reviews against housing developments annually on the fingers of one hand, if at all.
Regrettably, debates on the future of the Irish planning seem destined to go the way of the English planning system which has gained an unenviable reputation in recent years for having undergone a rapid succession of reforms and counter-reforms as a consequence of persistent anti-planning rhetoric from the political right to make planning more market-oriented. As noted by planning scholars, Graham Haughton and Phil Allmendinger, the near-perpetual state of reform has created the very conditions of crisis instability that helps feed the perception of constant failure that the ideological right thrives upon and, in repeatedly failing to achieve their marketised outcomes, they can simply continually blame the planning system and try, and fail, again on the basis that any failures were simply well-intended experiments that went wrong and always someone else’s fault.
Right on cue, along comes Minister Burke’s recently announced establishment of a Planning Advisory Forum stuffed full of all the usual suspects from Property Industry Ireland, Irish Institutional Property, the Construction Industry Federation and, of course as always, that erstwhile Fine Gael contrarian advisor Conor Skehan who recently proclaimed that, if you cannot afford to live in Dublin, you should just simply move somewhere else. According to the Terms of Reference for the forum, the main objective of the exercise is to ensure “increased clarity and streamlining” of planning legislation in the context of the “major debate, particularly on the scale of housing requirements”, “the needs of the future population of new and expanded communities” and “the nature of planning decisions, which require careful balancing of public policy, public participation and environmental issues”. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought planning was about the public interest and the common good? Are environmental issues not amongst the most important public policy issues?
Regardless, we all know what this is code for—deregulation. Having previously unsuccessfully proposed a bill, again at the behest of the property industry, to effectively abolish public access to justice in planning cases, which was condemned by the Free Legal Aid Counsel and many others as offending both the Irish constitution and EU law, this latest initiative has all the hallmarks of a workaround attempt to give legitimacy to these reactionary intentions by co-opting organisations like An Taisce, the Environmental Pillar and, of course, the Irish Planning Institute. One wonders why we give credibility to such charades. The planning system does not require ‘reform’. We need to stop ‘reforming’. It has already produced all the permissions we need for many years of supply. What it needs is proper resources and for the incessant, destructive meddling by development lobbyists, which precipitated the current dysfunction in the first place, to cease. As for An Bord Pleanála, it is beyond time that it shunned the fast-track limelight and retreated back to being the relatively obscure, prosaic and largely progressive, far-sighted institution it once was. We need it, but it will take some time for public trust in its shattered reputation to be restored.
Embodied carbon is the elephant in the room that may stymie all of our best-laid housing plans
One of the biggest myths we tell ourselves, in the context of the unfolding climate emergency, is that our normative expectations of the future can, more or less, carry on as normal. This applies equally to national political debates around how to solve the housing crisis, as to anything else. Whether on the left or the right, everybody agrees that more housing supply is the answer, although the manner in which that supply should be delivered of course differs markedly.
Yet, more often than not, the issue of expanding housing supply is discussed in near total isolation from the climate crisis and how we respond to it. The most recent figures from the Central Bank suggest that approximately 34,000 housing units will be required each year for at least the next decade – a figure which is largely accepted as gospel by all sides of the housing debate and likely to be included as the headline target in the Government’s forthcoming ‘Housing for All’ plan. Other estimates, such as those from Trinity College Dublin’s Ronan Lyons, puts the required number at closer to 47,000 per annum. Regardless, the general consensus is that an awful lot of new-build housing supply is required.
Private developers and the construction industry respond with glee to such projections, using them to put downward pressure on planning and building regulations, and to delegitimate public opposition to the ever increasing preponderance of very poor quality mass housing schemes. Activists on the left, on the other hand, argue that the government must commit to a doubling housing capital expenditure, as recommended by the ESRI, so as to achieve a build target of at least 20,000 public homes annually, insisting that anything less is just tinkering around the edges of an ever ballooning crisis.
The trouble is that building new housing is an incredibly carbon and energy intensive process, a fact which gets virtually no coverage whatsoever in the debates. While the data inevitably varies, research has shown that, on average, the carbon emissions associated with the construction of a new dwelling in Ireland, known as embodied carbon, is around 30 tonnes. This does not include the ongoing operational emissions associated with the use of the dwelling over its life-cycle or its eventual demolition, just the upfront carbon emitted during the manufacturing of the building materials, the transport of those materials to the site and the construction process itself.
Traditional cement and concrete based products, which remain highly predominant in new building in Ireland, account for roughly half of this embodied carbon. Indeed, concrete has been described as the most environmentally destructive material on earth, emitting 2.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases annually and responsible for 8% of global emissions, approximately three times that of aviation. The figures on worldwide concrete use are truly staggering. Since 2003, for example, China has poured more concrete every three years than the USA managed in the entire 20th century. If concrete was a country, it would be the third highest emitter of carbon in the world and it is the second most used substance globally, after water.
In Ireland, buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of energy related carbon emissions, with 28% coming from operational carbon and 11% coming from embodied carbon. However, while the policy and media attention has focused almost exclusively on the issue of operational carbon, such as the roll-out of energy retrofitting programmes, according to the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC), following the introduction of new building regulations in 2019, it is embodied carbon which now accounts for the major proportion (c.50%) of the total life-cycle carbon emissions of new homes.
Taking an average value of 30 tonnes of carbon per dwelling unit, building 34,000 houses would result in the production of over 1 million tonnes of emissions every year. The IGBC has estimated that, unless embodied carbon is radically reduced, constructing the 500,000 housing units envisaged as part of the National Planning Framework, and all the associated infrastructure, would result in between 38 and 50 million tonnes of carbon being emitted over the period to 2040.
The recently adopted Climate Change & Low Carbon Amendment Act 2021, however, requires that Ireland’s emissions fall by an annual average of approximately 3.5 million tonnes per year to 2030, halving our total annual emissions to just 31 million tonnes per annum by the end of the decade. It is evident that when housing supply and climate targets are set out side-by-side, the dilemma is stark. Developing that many new housing units while seeking to reduce emissions by that magnitude is problematic, to say the very least. The irony here is that if we were actually currently solving our housing crisis by providing much more supply, we would be simultaneously making our climate challenge worse, much worse.
At present, there are no firm proposals to regulate embodied carbon in Ireland. However, there are some promised changes at EU level and a number of European countries have already introduced measures which may ultimately have an influence here. However, given the immense lobbying power of the Irish Concrete Federation (ICF) and the general deference to the construction and property sectors, alongside the huge political pressure to urgently deliver new, affordable homes, it is probably unlikely to expect Ireland to be an early mover on enhanced regulation.
The difficulty of course is that concrete is both abundant and cheap, very cheap, accounting for just 3.4% of the cost of an average semi-detached house, according to the ICF. It is also a brilliantly adaptable building material, hence its ubiquity. The ICF estimate that delivering 500,000 new houses over the next 20 years will require the production of 1.5 billion tonnes of aggregates, which is also essential for concrete and cement production. The industry has therefore been busy lobbying for new fast-track planning rules to facilitate expanded quarry expansion, despite it’s rather dubious history of planning and regulatory compliance. To this day, there are dozens of illegal quarries operating throughout the country, causing significant environmental damage. Even during the recent high-profile mica and pyrite scandals, political criticism of the industry has been extremely muted.
The IGBC, on the other hand, whom have been a very lonely voice in trying to raise the profile of the hidden significance of embodied carbon, has been advocating for Ireland to commit to Net Zero Carbon Buildings, which would account for both the upfront and ongoing carbon emissions. At the very least, this would involve prioritising alternative and more sustainable construction materials which are low or zero carbon, such as the greater use of ‘green concrete’ and locally sourced timber products. The bad news is that many of these alternatives are in their infancy or face significant technical barriers to adoption, not least cost. Worse still, is that the main problem is really a matter of scale and the sheer demand for new buildings and urban infrastructure, which greatly outruns any carbon efficiency gains.
The IPCC Report published this week has unequivocally shown that we have entered the age of consequences and we are witnessing first-hand the devastating effects of global heating wreaking havoc around the world. Increasingly our lives will become dictated by rigorous adherence to carbon budgets, due to be published shortly, which will intersect all policy spheres, including housing, in multiple, complex ways. It is perhaps because of our inherited, implicit biases towards departmentalised, technical and supply-side solutions that we consistently fail to apprehend that climate change is a classic wicked problem. For example, we are already experiencing a chronic shortage in the supply of timber and any major expansion of the use of alternative low-carbon building technologies to address embodied carbon, especially the use of biomaterials, would have very significant knock-on implications for land use, particularly in the context of competing priorities such as biodiversity, carbon sequestration and food production. Similarly, Ireland is currently experiencing acute skilled labour shortages and lack of capacity in the construction sector, exacerbated by the pandemic, which may even see it have to choose between building new homes and retrofitting existing homes.
University College Dublin academic, Aidan Regan, has been to the fore in attempting to break down the silo mentality infecting housing policy debates, insisting instead that it must be seen as part of a broader urban crisis. To this, we urgently need to add the climate crisis – not just in respect of the relatively well understood issue of operational emissions, but also the very significant hidden challenge of embodied carbon. Moreover, achieving emissions targets directly calls into question Ireland’s preferred means of delivering new housing – the private market. Over the past decade, government has repeatedly foot-dragged on introducing higher building efficiency standards, fearful that increasing costs would be an impediment to supply and deter international capital. Given the basic profit fundament governing the property market, it is probably unreasonable to expect that it will be capable of delivering the homes needed in the context of an increased regulatory burden. This is, yet again, further justification for a much greater direct state involvement in the regulation and supply of new housing.
All of this of course will also have profound implications for how we plan and develop our cities and towns into the future. It is often said ‘the greenest building is one that is already built’ and it is estimated that Ireland has somewhere in the region of 200,000 vacant homes, enough for at least six years supply. Currently housing targets are allocated centrally and handed down from on high for local councils to prepare their zoning plans. It’s a simple numbers game. However, living within carbon budgets will mean that planning policy will have to become less about zoning, supply and densification within ‘compact growth’ principles but increasingly about how to avoid new building and infrastructure altogether through the creative reuse and repurposing of existing built stock within existing urban footprints. It will also mean that, instead of slavishly responding to market vagaries, planning will have to become more interventionist and directly involved in dictating what gets built, where, when and by whom (e.g. homes v. hotels etc).
Using a simple linear trajectory, the MarEI Institute at University College Cork has estimated that Ireland’s maximum carbon budget to 2030 is in, or around, 423 million tonnes. This budget will be subject to many competing demands (e.g. agriculture) and very complex decarbonisation challenges (e.g. transport). On our current trajectory we are estimated to emit 654 million tonnes over the same period. The challenge is without parallel. How we choose to spend our available carbon budget will be a matter of political will and choice involving very painful decisions, at least in the short-run, in staring down business-as-usual vested interests.
None of this, of course, is to argue against developing new housing. There is an absolutely necessity to provide high-quality net zero carbon homes. But as I have argued before, we may also need to downscale our taken-for-granted assumptions of very high future housing demand, which are substantially based on an extrapolation of historic trends of high economic growth and immigration into the future. In a climate changed world, past results are not a reliable guide of future performance. Lands zoned for housing may also need to be re-tasked for other uses, such as providing more natural green spaces and adaptation to ever more severe and disruptive weather events (e.g. flood attenuation, urban heat island effects etc.). It is hard to overestimate the revolutionary implications this will have for, not just planning, but also land markets, the entire functioning of the economy, fiscal policy, balanced regional development etc., and will require nothing less than a transformed planning culture.
We have not just entered the age of consequences, but the age of (very hard) choices.
Back in 2009, at the height of global financial crisis, John Lovering in a hard-hitting editorial in International Planning Studies declared that, finally, it had happened.
The recession marked ‘the end of planning as we had known it’. There was no going back. The neoliberal model of urban policy-making, “it’s inequities, it’s harmful social and cultural effects, it’s disastrous impact on the environment and its economic unsustainability” was dead.
Except of course, like previous crises, it wasn’t.
Phoenixlike, the strange non-death of neoliberalism emerged unfazed. The Irish planning profession, anxious to deflect from its complicity in the Celtic Tiger and unsure of what else to do, slavishly followed along as every manner of idiotic mass tourism hotel, student housing scheme, build-to-rent apartment development, co-living unit and high-rise office block was approved, each testament to the parasitic power and private fortunes of international capital wrapped up in some Orwellian supply-side doublespeak of what is good for us.
Fast forward ten years, and there has been much talk again recently, in light of the COVID19 crisis, of the urgent need for a deep structural change in the planning and organisation of our urban environments. We have seen some promising signs in this direction as cities across Europe, including Dublin, seize the opportunity to repurpose streets from private cars to pedestrians and cyclists – initiatives long held back by reactionary interests – and a greater acknowledgement of the real value of green spaces, clean air, noiselessness, social cohesion and nature in urban liveability. These may be temporary, but demonstrate what is possible.
The pandemic has also laid bare the recrudesce of a planning system that has once more been reduced to a reactive, short-term and opportunity-driven activity which is likely to see the our cities littered with overcapacity and stranded assets.
The economic impact of COVID19 is, as yet, unknown but projections suggest it is likely to be severe and turbulent. As in 2009, the planning profession is about to be again sharply thrust up against what is probably its chief intellectual weakness – what to do when the land market is rendered largely inoperative? In such a situation the pattern of land-use will have to be determined administratively, but planning, as a body of knowledge, offers no ideas as to how this might be done. Paralysis ensues.
Like all cultural shocks, the COVID19 disruption presents liminal spaces, moments of cultural rupture, to rethink and do things differently, and to listen to alternative voices from outside the mainstream proposing hitherto unthinkable solutions – but who are almost always ignored – that radically challenge our take-for-granted worldviews in ways that is impossible through incremental change.
In order to make the best of this opportunity, planners will first have to wake up to the inexorable socio-ecological realities and discontinuities that will transform their identities in the 21st Century and recognise that, as Lovering advised, the best place for many of the policies pursued over the past decades is in the bin.
First to go should be the speculative, pseudo-planning ‘compact city’ doctrine and the much-purported groupthink amongst developers and urban growthists that urban regeneration needs to be hyper-densified in order to be sustainable, but which has thus far failed to regenerate much beyond the bottom-line of the property developers, financiers and consultants.
Alternative pathways abound, leaning on insights from the peripheries of orthodox received wisdom. The City of Amsterdam, for example, has recently adopted a new holistic strategy for transformative urban action based on the pioneering ‘Doughnut Economics’ of British economist, Kate Raworth.
The Amsterdam ‘City Donut’ presents a long-term planning policy vision which seeks to supplant the growth-orientated and competitive commodification of the city with ‘a thriving, regenerative and inclusive city for all citizens, while respecting the planetary boundaries’ to tackle climate breakdown and ecological collapse. To this end Amsterdam has joined the Thriving Cities Initiative (TCI), a collaboration between C40, Circle Economy, and Doughnut Economics Action Lab, which works with cities pursuing such a transformation.
Such dissident thinking, which has long been ‘beyond the pale’ for Irish policy elites, resonates with the open letter, signed by more than a thousand academics and experts from more than sixty countries, calling for Degrowth – a democratically planned yet adaptive, sustainable, and equitable downscaling of the economy – to be put at the centre of the COVID19 response, to build a more just and sustainable society and prevent further crises.
The Degrowth urban manifesto seeks to give the city back to its people, radically reorganise transport and mobility, (re)naturalise and decommodify the city, and, rather than densify, significantly increase space dedicated to green space, tree cover; biodiversity and urban ecosystems; and public housing, with a focus urban mobility on cycling, walking and public transport. These ideas reflect new ideas emerging from ‘post-growth’ planning thought which emphasises, solidarity, wellbeing, connectedness, empathy and a lifestyle based on principles of sufficiency.
Supporting growth and an irrational belief in ever rising asset values has, of course, always been the primary and unquestioned motivation of urban planning. It shall come as no surprise that, just as it was in the aftermath of the 2009 crisis, embracing new ethics and post-materialistic values will be stringently resisted by the old order who, as long as there are no viable alternatives, will engage in predatory delay insisting that the solution to the crisis is to work even harder at business-as-usual. Neoliberal urbanism has, after all, demonstrated extraordinary asymmetric capacity to crimp and contain disconfirming alternatives .
However, these are ideas whose time is coming. Nature is foreclosing our culture. To return to Lovering’s exhortation, planners will not be leading the action here, however “if they can shed the myopic habits of recent years and recapture the broader social and ethical inspirations with which the very concept of planning in modern times began, then planning might once again become worthy of the name”.
We cannot afford to waste the opportunity of crisis once more. Resigned realism is the best way to ensure the least transformative outcome.
Irish Planning Blog 
