Planning Must Be For The Common Good Rather Than Private Profit
Friday, April 04, 2008
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 while at the same time many developments lack basic social and physical infrastructure and sustainable transport options, according to the President of the Irish Planning Institute (IPI), Mr Andrew Hind.
Speaking at the IPI’s National Planning Conference in Westport, Co Mayo, today (Thur), he added that while State and local authorities have to produce vast sums of money to remedy the problem, land owners and developers “appear immersed in colossal one-off windfall profits.”
Mr Hind stated: “That the planning system should operate so that the making of private fortunes seemingly has a higher priority than the provision of basic social and physical infrastructure and sustainable transport was not part of the vision that the fathers of today’s planning system envisaged.”
He called for an urgent revision of the system of contributions which 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.”
Mr Hind pointed out that the Town and Regional Planning Act 1934 - the country’s first planning legislation - included provisions that allowed local authorities to demand that those whose land and property benefited from the provision of new public infrastructure should pay 75 per cent of the value added to their land or property back to the authority within one 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 pre-determined share in the value of the development potential created.
Mr Hind stated: “The problem we face today 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. In many ways the problem is a simple one: developers and landowners are not paying a large enough share of the cost of properly servicing their development with social as well as physical infrastructure.”
Speaking to the conference theme of “Sustainability – Are We Really Achieving It?”, he said that merely adding the word “sustainable” to legislation did not make any difference on its own. “What matters is whether or not our system is delivering more sustainable forms of development.”
Sustainable development meant protecting the public interest or the common good but during recent years of economic growth, individual interests too often had won out in battles against the common good.
Examples where the common good has not been successfully protected despite the best efforts of planners, included:
• Proliferation of large one-off houses spread 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 instead of public transport investment coupled with road pricing
“One of the difficulties that we’ve faced in the last few years has been that of providing the social and physical infrastructure for all the new development that has taken place. All around the country our failure to deliver properly designed water and waste-water infrastructure has left not just individual houses, but significant residential areas with sub-standard water supplies and waste water treatment infrastructure,” Mr Hind stated.
Our non-national road infrastructure was, by and large, as it was 70 or 80 years ago but it is being asked to carry 21st century traffic volumes and, at the same time we expect we all expect it to deliver 21st Century road safety standards.
In many areas we have also failed 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”.
He added: “We’ve also failed to deliver a sustainable transport system to meet the needs of our economy and the communities it supports. 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.”
The overhaul of the system for contributions with this overall aim 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
The relevant Act needed to be revised to embody the principle that developers would be expected to pay all the costs associated with new or improved social and physical infrastructure necessary to support their development.
Such infrastructure” should include:
• Public water supplies
• Public facilities for waste water treatment
• New footpaths, cycle-ways or roads (or improvements) (including national roads)
• Primary and secondary school places to meet the needs of those living, or likely to live, in the development
• New, or adapted, public transport infrastructure
“It also needs to be said that it won’t be enough to just secure the payment of contributions under these headings. The finance raised needs to be protected by a legislative framework and ring fenced so that it is spent in a timely way on the infrastructure for which it was intended,” stated Mr Hind.