Peter Casey's new idea for housing: Ditch An Bord Pleanála?

I present to you (part of) a press release from Peter Casey, seeking election as an MEP for Midlands North West. Casey wants, as the headline of this piece mentions, to ditch An Bord Pleanála and return questions of planning to local councils and local democracy:

It is beyond belief that Ireland is in the middle of a housing crisis, and somebody from Mizen Head can object to planning permission for a housing project in Malin Head for a mere €150 fee, bringing a much-needed housing project to a grinding halt for, on average, a year because An Bord Pleanála’s appeal system is backed up.

“It is almost as bad as the delays with the asylum seekers. You should only be allowed to appeal a housing project if you have a vested interest in the region.

“I speak from personal experience because I have been trying to build urgently needed homes in Donegal, which would bring much-needed jobs to the area and help young people get a foot onto the property ladder.

“But frivolous appeals have knocked the project back a year, and there is nothing to stop objectors from appealing appeals, which could set such projects back another year.

This is one of those ideas that will sound more radical and controversial than it really should be. One of the core principles of a good democracy is something called subsidiarity: That is to say, decisions should always be taken as locally and as close to the community affected by those decisions as is feasibly possible.

With Irish planning law, this is not the case: Final decisions, in most cases, rest with a national body, and not the democratically elected local council. Casey is correct in his assertion that a person can object to a development without ever really being impacted by it, or even visiting the locale in which the development is due to be built.

The reason we have An Bord Pleanála, as with so many other Irish laws, is essentially climate and the environment: There needs, some argue, to be some kind of national oversight of planning to ensure that environments are protected, and planning laws followed. Why shouldn’t someone in Carlow be able to object to a planned development in Donegal if that development is going to meaningfully harm a rare species of moth or butterfly? Just because locals don’t care about the environment, the argument goes, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be protected.

Then the other argument is about corruption: For years Irish planning law was subject to the tyranny of the brown envelope. Taking it away from councils and putting it in the hands of an unelected national body made it harder, the theory goes, for people to be tempted to start stuffing notes into other people’s pockets.

These are decent arguments for national oversight, but there’s an equally decent argument that they amounted to using a hammer to crack a nut: If the law of the land prohibits destroying important habitats, then county councils are obligated to obey that law. If they refuse to do so, judicial review of their decisions in the courts is an option. Equally, to the extent that corruption is an issue with elected councillors, or ever becomes an issue, that is a policing matter and one better addressed by a national anti-corruption agency with real teeth.

The fundamental issue here is one of local democracy: If we want more homes built in the country, then some communities are going to have to grow faster than others and some land which is not currently built on will have to be built over. Allowing local communities to decide these matters for themselves, by and large, is a good idea for several reasons.

First, it will not stop NIMBYism – there will still be communities in Ireland that object to everything – but it will punish it, much more effectively than the current system. This is because investment, housing, and people – and eventually jobs – will pour into those communities more open to development at a greater rate than it will into those that are more closed to it.

Second, it would make planning overall more politically accountable: The objective of anybody interested in democracy and democratic accountability should always be to minimise the number of statutory bodies that exercise power without being elected. An Bord Pleanála is such a body – you can’t vote its members out of office. You can vote your county councillors out of office, as some of them will discover in eleven days.

Finally, it would acknowledge that An Bord Pleanála is little more than a duplicate of a system we already have in place – the courts. There is already a legal mechanism to ensure that councils are abiding by national planning laws and objectives. There is no need for a middleman, which is what An Bord amounts to.

Elections are useful not only in determining who wins, but also as a forum for raising issues worthy of discussion. In this case, whatever one’s views of Casey as a candidate, his instincts on policy have generated an idea worth talking about, in the context of Ireland’s housing crisis.