Yesterday Minister Phil Hogan announced that the National Spatial Strategy (NSS) is to be scrapped and replaced by a new policy in about a year’s time. He said that said the present ‘strategy had failed’ because ‘the gateway and hub cities and towns never received the resources to ensure their development and “nothing has happened” in the ten years since they were designated.’ Continuing that ‘there was no point in having a designation without the resources.’
It is certainly the case that the NSS did not live up to its expectations, despite its promise and intent. The initiative failed for a number of reasons, of which resourcing is just one.
First, there were flaws in its initial design with respect to the designation of too many hubs and gateways and there were accusations of stroke politics in location selection.
Second, because it was introduced in 2002 it missed its logical initial resourcing stream, the National Development Plan (NDP) 2000-06. It did underpin the NDP 2007-13, but then the crisis hit and the NDP got quitely dropped and funding for NSS initiatives, such as the gateways fund, was one of the first things the DECLG dropped from its programme.
Third, there was weak political buy-in across the board, especially within government. This was made abundantely clear by the decentralisation programme introduced by Charlie McCreevy in 2003 that sought to move government departments and state agencies to just about every location except gateways and hubs. Decentralisation seriously undermined the rationale and impetus of the NSS.
Fourth, the NSS was not put on a statutory basis and up until 2010 planning authorities only had to give ‘due regard’ to it, rather than complying with it. In a period of developer-led, laissez faire, localist planning this was a license to largely ignore it.
What this meant was a very partial implementation, though the NSS did have some effects on other policy (e.g. NDP, Transport 21, Rural Ireland 2020, etc) and was significantly boosted by the introduction of regional planning guidelines and the Planning and Development Act (2010) and the introduction of core strategies (in which planning decisions have to demonstrate they fit local, county, regional and national policy objectives).
So what happens now? Is this the end of spatial planning in Ireland?
Well one would hope not. If Ireland ever needed a strategic plan to make the most of limited resources in order to facilitate inward investment, stimulate and support indigenous growth, produce sustainable development and create of better places, it is now.
The logic of spatial planning is to align and coordinate sectoral initiatives (such as transport, energy, jobs, property, utilities, communications, public services, etc) across territory in order to leverage complementarities, reduce redundancy and duplication, increase competitiveness, and create multiplier effects (where the sum is greater than the simple addition of parts). It does this by selectively prioritising areas for different kinds of activities in line with its demographics and local resources and distributing funds suitable to enable targetted investment and coordinating development across sectors.
Rather than abandoning spatial planning and the NSS, we need to do a fundamental rethink and produce a new NSS that is suitable to the present context. Localism and ad-hocism is not the solution to the economic and social crisis and will not create a sustainable, competitive country into the long term.
The challenge over the next year is to produce a new NSS based on a robust evidence base, learning from international best practice, and involving detailed stakeholder consultation, that is strategic and is prepared to make difficult decisions given limited resources. Once agreed upon, the new NSS needs to be put on a statutory basis, as advocated in the Mahon Report, and it needs to be implemented through a series of interlocking programmes and initiatives.
My hope is that we can rise to this challenge and produce a spatial planning framework that will serve us well.
Rob Kitchin
For a good introduction to the present NSS, see the recent special edition of Administration 60(3), The National Spatial Strategy: Ten Years On, guest edited by David Meredith and Chris van Egeraat.
Revisiting the National Spatial Strategy ten years on – David Meredith & Chris van Egeraat
The National Spatial Strategy: Rationale, process, performance and prospects – James A. Walsh
Economics – The missing link in the National Spatial Strategy – Edgar Morgenroth
Perspectives on Ireland’s economic geography: An evaluation of spatial structures – David Meredith, Jim Walsh & Ronan Foley
Gateways, hubs and regional specialisation in the National Spatial Strategy – Chris van Egeraat, Proinnsias Breathnach & Declan Curran
Urban specialisation, complementarity and spatial development strategies on the island of Ireland – Des McCafferty, Chris van Egeraat, Justin Gleeson & Brendan Bartley
Governance and the National Spatial Strategy – Placing spatial policy at the heart of the diagonal public service – Séan O’Riordáin
Shrink smarter? Planning for spatial selectivity in population growth in Ireland – Gavin Daly & Rob Kitchin
Ireland after NAMA 
February 13, 2013 at 9:47 pm
“Fourth, the NSS was not put on a statutory basis and up until 2010 planning authorities only had to give ‘due regard’ to it, rather than complying with it. In a period of developer-led, laissez faire, localist planning this was a license to largely ignore it.”
Correct.
It was designed by Fianna Fail-to be ignored,and so it was.
Martin Cullen and the rest of his ilk drove a coach and four through the whole concept.
February 14, 2013 at 2:38 pm
NSS – RIP
Intellectuals such as Professor Kitchin obsess incessantly about the evil effects of “Localism” and “ad-hocism” in planning. But I think they fail to realize the true depth of cynicism of a government that rules purely by words.
You see we don’t have a Democracy, we have a “Logocracy”, which as Orwell said contrives to “…give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
In 1957 when government realized to true cost of the Dublin City Plan its reaction was to change the planning laws. Plans would henceforth become formulae of words rather than statements of intent.
It took almost another half century but eventually the Bankers too rumbled the secret previously known only to politicians. They bottled and sold pure wind by means of a planning system that converted words into a cash liability for imaginary land values.
When the bottles were opened and found to contain “flatus” the innocent Greens (if that is not a tautology) sought to regulate the content of the bottles, to add perhaps some semblance of meaning to the formulae of words.
But now Big Phil is moving to dismantle the bottling plant. “It didn’t work” he says, “because there was no money backing it.” But from the foundation of the state, The Centre as it likes to be known, has repeated a consistent mantra to local government; “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
Will a future government break the habit of a century of tradition and make funds available to implement plans? Don’t hold your breath.
When next you breathe in you don’t want to suffocate in the “flatus”.
February 14, 2013 at 8:22 pm
Richard, I fully realise the cynicism of government both national and local. I am, however, not resigned to it and would prefer to try and envisage and encourage change rather than simply wallow solely in cynicism.
February 18, 2013 at 12:12 pm
Ambrose Bierce defined a cynic as “… a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things are they are and not as they ought to be”. Such perspicacity is a very desirable characteristic of a Government Department charged with spending our hard-earned taxes.
So let me give a very recent example of government cynicism. The Department of Finance has announced “The Living City Initiative, A new Pilot project for Urban Regeneration”. The scheme uses information drawn from the POBAL index of deprivation to justify the selection of cities to which special tax incentives will apply. The Department of Finance brief goes on to state that the incentives are aimed at …”Georgian houses”, where the “ … house is the principal private residence of the person.”
On the face of it this appears a worthy initiative. “So where is the cynicism?” you may ask.
Well, the initiative is clearly aimed at “owner-occupiers” and the areas for which the initiative is expressly designed, that is Georgian areas, have the lowest owner-occupation in the whole of the State. In the most extreme example, based on the same POBAL index, in “Shannon A Ward” in Limerick City, merely 1.2% of the buildings could qualify under the owner-occupier rule.
I wish you “Bonne Chance” in your campaign for the encouragement of change.
February 17, 2013 at 10:00 pm
I have watched the experience of the NSS with interest (I wrote about it for my planning diploma dissertation!). We in the UK have had debates about having a national spatial plan in some form since the 1920s, and these have always stalled due to the unwillingness to have the kind of strong agency outside the existing economic ministries (Treasury and Trade) that would be needed to have a document that made a real difference. The only “National Plan” we ever had was something that looked like the Irish NDP, and it was invalidated almost as soon as it was published by a currency crisis.
Personally I feel that spatial planning in the sense Rob Kitchen uses the term is still too under thought out to be a firm basis for this kind of thing. We assume that integrating policy on all the things he mentions makes a difference, but I don’t think that it’s possible to say that (to take one example) the interaction between infrastructure investment and development outcomes are the same everywhere across a country, particularly when you are trying to achieve an objective running against the grain of the market.
I think it’s a bit more complicated than a simple choice between envisaging and encouraging change on the one hand and cynicism on the other. What breeds cynicism is churning out high-sounding visions which raise expectations but make no real difference in the end, which is the inevitable outcome of setting ambitions beyond the scope of the ability to realise them. In Ireland’s case, I realised that the NSS wasn’t to be taken seriously when I saw Eamon O’Cuiv on the Late Late Show making a fuss about one off houses.
All this said, I greatly enjoy the blog, and I’ll follow up on the references you have given. Planners in Ireland and the UK have much to learn from each other, and we don’t talk nearly enough.
March 6, 2013 at 8:27 am
The National Spatial Strategy (NSS) was launched by the Irish government, with considerable fanfare, in November 2002. It was a bold 20-year plan for achieving geographically balanced development in Ireland through allowing each region to maximise its development potential.
The NSS had two main objectives: firstly, to provide a national planning framework for managing the massive investment in productive activities, infrastructure, housing and services which was occurring at the time, and, secondly, to slow down and ultimately halt the continued concentration of growth in the Greater Dublin region.
The key element of the NSS was the proposal to enhance the capacity of the main regional cities to stimulate development within their respective regions through acting as magnets for the attraction of productive investment, particularly by foreign firms.
In the past, foreign investment in Ireland had been widely dispersed throughout the country. This was made possible by the low skill levels and routine production activities involved in these investments. However, they set down few local roots and most of the branch plants in question have long since disappeared.
The inward investment which underpinned the Celtic Tiger involved much higher skill levels and was much more concerned with finding locations which could provide a suitable supply of skilled workers. More recently, foreign investment in Ireland has been dominated by services activities (software, financial and business services) for which urban locations are of key importance.
Attracting such investment to regional locations, therefore, required targetted investment in the main regional centres to ensure that they could provide the supplies of skilled workers and urban services and infrastructure required by potential investors. The NSS therefore envisaged these centres as acting as “gateways” for channelling investment into the regions and resultant exports out of the regions and into the global economy.
While this strategy made sound planning sense in principle, from the outset the NSS was beset with profound implementation difficulties. In a foreword to the NSS document, the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern pledged the government’s full support to the strategy’s objectives, but this never materialised.
The massive public investments involved in the National Development Plan (2000-2006) ploughed ahead without any reference to regional development objectives. One of the first casualties of government spending cutbacks following the 2008 economic crash was a planned special fund for gateway development.
The government’s 2004 programme to relocate over 10,000 civil service jobs from Dublin completely ignored the NSS. Very few of the jobs, and none of the seven departmental headquarters which were to be relocated were earmarked for the gateway centres.
Furthermore, the NSS made no provision for the new types of governance structure necessary for successful implementation of the strategy. Strong leadership was required to mobilise local authorities, government agencies, the business and voluntary sectors to work together in pursuit of shared aims at the regional level. Regional governments have played the leading role in creating such “development coalitions” in other European countries.
In Ireland, the required leadership structures do not exist at regional level. The NSS relied on local authorities coming together voluntarily to provide the necessary organisational structures – a tall order given the tradition of rivalry which exists between Irish local authorities.
However, even where such structures were created – as they eventually were in most cases – they lacked the authority and powers required to function effectively. In contrast with other European countries, Irish local authorities have very limited functions, with most public services being the responsibility of central government departments and agencies.
This means that local councils have little leverage when it comes to getting central agencies to act in support of locally-determined plans and objectives, and particularly in securing coordinated action by these agencies at local/regional level.
This problem was highlighted in a 2008 review of the Irish public service by the OECD. This review identified as a major weakness the low level of collaboration which exists at national level between government departments and agencies. This results, according to the review, in a lack of “coherence in policy development, implementation and service delivery”.
This lack of coherence is reproduced at regional and local levels where, as the OECD notes: “Local authorities …have no responsibility for nationally provided services and limited, if any, levers to direct how national service providers actually operate.”
The impact on the NSS of the lack of joined-up thinking in public policy-making is well reflected in the current controversies regarding hospital services in the Southeast region. The NSS pointed to the importance of providing a high-quality living environment in the gateway centres as a means of attracting and retaining highly skilled and mobile workers. The availability of regional hospitals providing high-level specialised care was specifically highlighted in this respect.
However, current proposals for the restructuring of hospital services in the Southeast will have the effect of downgrading the regional hospital in Waterford, the designated regional gateway centre. Favoured capital and current funding of Kilkenny and Wexford hospitals will have a similar effect.
The problems facing NSS implementation arising from poor governance structures were identified in a series of reports by Forfás and the National Economic and Social Council, but these generated no government response. Meanwhile, progress in effecting the NSS ground to a halt, and the government’s decision to scrap it amounts to no more than administering the last rites to a long-expired cadaver.
The government has said that it will prepare a new strategy to replace the NSS. However, the basic principles which underpinned the NSS remain sound and in line with best international practice. What was needed was not its replacement, but the provision of the governance structures which would allow it to function properly.
Unfortunately, the recently-published proposals for local government reform suggest that the current government has no better grasp than its predecessor of the crucial role of devolved governance in the regional development process.
May 13, 2013 at 10:57 am
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