Yesterday saw the publication of the first in a series of reports by An Taisce on planning and environmental policy in Ireland. State of the Nation: A Review of Ireland’s Planning System 2000 – 2011 provides an overview and critique of the operation of the planning system in Ireland during the period of the worst excesses of Celtic Tiger bubble. It is fair to say that An Taisce is not a neutral voice with respect to planning or environmental or heritage issues, nonetheless their data is compelling, and as they state themselves their purpose “is not blinkered opposition to development, but opposition to blinkered development”. And we’ve certainly had a lot of the latter in the past two decades along with localism and cronyism and at times corruption.
As part of the report, An Taisce graded each local authority with respect to 8 criteria.
1 Overzoning Amount of zoned land as a percentage of population in 2011.
2 Decisions reversed by An Bord Pleanala 2005 – 2010
3 Decisions confirmed by An Bord Pleanala 2005 – 2010
4 Percentage of vacant housing stock 2006 – 2011
5 Change in vacant housing housing stock 2006 2011
6 Water quality. Urban areas with secondary treatment failing to meet EPS standards 2011
7 Percentage of one-off houses permitted as a percentage of all residential planning permissions 2001 – 2011
8 Legal proceedings commenced following non-compliance with enforcement notice 2005 – 2010
This seems like a fairly robust set of measures to assess planning performance, concerning overzoning, planning appeals, oversupply, water quality, enforcements. The one variable that would have been good to add for oversupply, but for which their is no data, is vacant commerical property. Some data on the ratio of serviced and unserviced zoned land and permissions on flood plains, etc would have been useful as well, but would have probably done little to the overall result. It is perhaps worth noting that variables 4, 5 and 7 would tend to work in favour of urban authorities (though 7 is tempered by 6) – re. criteria 4 and 5 planning might not have been any better in urban areas than rural areas, but very strong population growth meant what was built was occupied. Regardless, oversupply is a significant issue in many rural counties and should not have been allowed to happen. It should also be pointed out that other government policy, beyond planning policy, was driving development in all counties, but disproportionately in rural counties, namely tax incentives. Again, how these tax incentive developments were implemented could have been better handled, but there was certainly political pressure to facilitate them.
The results from these variables provided grades for each local authority (see map below).
Using their 8 criteria, nine local authorities score bottom marks: ‘F-‘ is awared to Donegal, Roscommon, Leitrim and Kerry; ‘F’ to Mayo, Galway County, Cavan, Carlow and Waterford County. All other counties score D’s or E’s except for South Dublin, DLR, Fingal and Galway City who score C’s. Everywhere it seems was poor, with some counties worse than others.
Why does this all matter? Planning decisions are economic and social decisions – they set out patterns of development, service costs, travel costs, etc and generally shape the space economy. Making good planning decisions leads to social dividends and economic growth, poor decisions leads to weak or negative growth, additional costs and losses – and these have long term consequences. Changes to the landscape such as new buildings or roads or quarries, etc are generally very long-term alterations; they are lived with by not just this generation but many generations to come. And when it all goes wrong, like it has in Ireland, the taxpayer is left to pick up the costs of excessive development loans (think bank bailouts, NAMA, the troika, austerity, etc) and the social consequences (think unfinished estates, houses flooding, bottled water or water from tankers, etc).
In my view the report should be read by any person interested in sustainable development and communities in Ireland and be compulsorary reading for anyone involved in planning at all scales in the country, particularly councillors, national politicians and local authorities. As this report and the Mahon Report make clear we need changes to how planning is viewed and understood and how it is implemented. Planning should be utilitarian and for the social good; some of it in Ireland works that way, much does not. An Taisce’s report provides much food for thought useful for conceiving what kind of planning system we want.
Rob Kitchin
Ireland after NAMA 
April 18, 2012 at 11:05 am
Donegal county council have hit back at the An Taisce report. Here are links to two pieces.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0417/donegal-council-hits-back-at-planning-report.html
http://www.thejournal.ie/unbalanced-ambiguous-and-biased-donegal-council-hits-back-at-an-taisce-421203-Apr2012/
Frankly, their rebuttal as detailed in the papers is pretty pathetic. It does not systematically work through the An Taisce method or the evidence it provides. If Donegal is a rural county – the main argument for rejecting the An Taisce analysis – why was it planning like an urban one? Enough land zoned for 180,000 people when it’s existing population is 161,137. And whether you are rural or urban the base vacancy should be 6% (not 15.9% exc holiday homes). Losing planning appeals has nothing to do with being rural or urban. etc. Good planning is good planning regardless of county characteristics – planning and those characteristics should align.
I would be much more interested Interested in hearing how they justify the level of overzoning, lost appeals, oversupply, water quality, enforcements, than flat refutes based on rural planning being somehow special.
April 18, 2012 at 11:13 am
I have to agree that our present planning system is broken and ought to be replaced but I cannot agree with your comment that the ranking system presented here is a robust contribution to the debate.
My first objection is that a weighting system has been applied to the results and this weighting system is not presented in the paper. In Appendix 2 the “County Score” is not the simple sum of the rankings but has been manipulated in some fashion. But this is a relatively minor gripe since the use of unweighted scores will not change the ordering of counties significantly. Donegal and Dublin still hold their relative places at both ends of the scale. It would however change the “marking”, placing three authorities above 80%.
So if the introduction of “weighting” was merely in order to achieve a slightly more dramatic headline then I have to suggest that the whole content of the report must be questioned.
My second point concerns the choice of indicators and the assignment to them of implied meanings. For example, the ranking uses two indicators derived from An Bord Pleanala. These are “Decisions Overturned” and “Decisions Confirmed”. The implication is that “bad” decisions are likely to be overturned and “good” decisions confirmed. This implication is strengthened in the text by the statement that An Taisce has an 80% success rate in its appeals against what it considers “bad” local decisions. But of course “bad” decisions can also be confirmed and “good” decisions overturned and thus it is questionable if these two indicators are indicative of anything or if they merely cancel each other out – which indeed they do.
My third point concerns the ranking on Water Quality. There is an unthinking assumption at work here and in the choice of the indicator “One-off Houses” which states that one-off houses in the country are “bad” while growing our towns is “good”. After all, one-off houses are said to be the unwanted product of cronyism and clientist decisions. But as the EPA makes clear, nearly 30% of water pollution comes from inadequate town sewerage systems while less than 7% derives from one-off house systems. Now Local Authorities are responsible for Urban sewerage systems but they can only install systems with the aid of government grants. The lack of appropriate systems derives not from bad planning nor from lack of planning but from lack of finance. And government grants can only be obtained by … clientism! on a grand scale. Thus we have a planning system which at every level reinforces political features which are anathema to good planning.
Yet even if we can eliminate half the indicators, the assessment still results in the same ordering of counties. So if you wonder why Donegal is fixed at one end of this scale and Dublin at the other, you need look no further than the table of incomes by County. Donegal is the poorest county in Ireland and Dublin is the wealthiest. People get the service (and planning is a service) that they can afford. This disparity in wealth smacks of the old epithet “Croppy lie down!” (and keep your county tidy for your betters to drive through.)
April 18, 2012 at 12:45 pm
I think you might be over thinking it. The report doesn’t purport to be scientific. It states:
‘It is acknowledged that planning is a complex and
nuanced field and many outcomes cannot be
measured with ease. It is further acknowledged that
many councils work in difficult economic, social and
political circumstances which shape planning
outcomes. Accordingly there is no perfect data
source available for measuring the performance of
councils. Nevertheless, there are sources of
independent data which can usefully paint a
general picture of relative performance in the
planning arena.
The aim here to assemble information to assess
planning in Ireland, to stimulate debate, and to
facilitate interaction between councils leading to
the spread of best practice – all three aims are in
the public interest and can aid Ireland’s future
prosperity’
April 18, 2012 at 1:32 pm
I love the phrase “over-thinking”. If your quote is correct that the purpose of the report is to “assemble information to assess planning in Ireland” then surely we need to assemble good information because the conclusion drawn is most serious;
“the picture indicates systemic failure on a nationwide basis on the back of a generally very poor performance by councils in discharging their planning functions.”
Or does your phrase imply that we should set out to change a broken system by “under-thinking” it? Or perhaps by not thinking at all?
Does it imply that debate should be based on such opinions as one might hear in drunken pub-conversations on a Saturday night?
Or are you saying that the information being collected and published and on which policy and decisions will be based is not fit for purpose?
Or are you saying that the apparent poor state of planning in Ireland is just a “consensual hallucination” and that in reality everything is A-OK?
If serious views are placed in the public domain and are declared to be based on “information” then the relevance and veracity of those views must be tested by testing the supporting information.
Otherwise you are merely consenting to the hallucination.
April 18, 2012 at 1:41 pm
Think the report speaks for itself on that.