Apologies have been received from Deputies Sean Fleming, Joe Neville, Shay Brennan, John Clendennen, Réada Cronin, Tony McCormack and Louis O'Hara, and also Senators Aidan Davitt and Eileen Flynn.

I advise members of the constitutional requirements that members must be physically present in the confines of the Leinster House complex to participate in public meetings. Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or otherwise engage that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of a person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

We will suspend the sitting briefly to bring in the witnesses.

I welcome everybody to today's meeting. We greatly appreciate their attendance.

The purpose of today's meeting is to discuss the importance of best practice in architecture, planning and chartered surveying in the delivery of high-quality national infrastructure. I am pleased to welcome Ms Kathryn Meghen, CEO, Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, RIAI; Mr. David Browne, consultant at RKD Architects and former president, RIAI; Mr. Bryn Griffiths, chartered quantity surveyor and chair of the quantity surveying professional group; Mr. Eoin Wilcox, chartered quantity surveyor, Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, SCSI; Mr. Gavin Lawlor, president; Ms Juliet Ryan, treasurer; and Dr. Séan O'Leary, senior planner, Irish Planning Institute, IPI.

Witnesses are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

I remind members that they will be afforded a six-minute speaking slot for each question and answer section. Everybody who wishes can come in for a second round of questions.

We will hear from the groups in the following order: the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland, the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland and the Irish Planning Institute. I invite the first witnesses to give their testimonies.

I am joined by Mr. David Browne, past president of the RIAI. The institute was founded in 1839 and represents 5,000 architects and architectural technologists who work in the public and private sectors.

Our members design and oversee the delivery of homes, schools, universities, healthcare, workplaces, public realm and critical infrastructure. Accordingly, we hold a unique body of knowledge on how we can increase and optimise our built environment, how we can tackle waste and delay in the building process and ensure high-quality delivery for people and society. RIAI members are determined to deliver the right housing and infrastructure solutions, but consultation is critical. Consultation by government has too often been limited to developers, rather than industry professionals delivering project.

We would like to focus on three areas today: housing, planning and public procurement. In regard to housing, Ireland’s housing deficit is among our most urgent challenges and we acknowledge the absence of easy solutions. Delivering housing infrastructure takes time and the national development plan, NDP, provides a strong foundation. However, we believe we must go further than this framework alone. Current housing and infrastructure provision falls far short of what is needed to support the rapidly expanding population. We believe the current processes are not focused on achieving the most climate resilient solutions.

As proposed in the Government’s newly published Delivering Homes, Building Communities document, meeting the population demand will require the construction of 300,000 homes by 2030 and possibly between 450,000 and even 850,000 by 2050. Identifying the locations for these homes will enable spatial planning to be aligned with balanced capital investment. This would ensure that public infrastructure is put in place ahead of the construction and occupation of these new homes. This is the type of policy shift we need to deliver appropriate climate resilient buildings and infrastructure. We have seen this done in other jurisdictions like Copenhagen, where housing follows infrastructure, a city that has been doing this successfully for 70 years.

The RIAI supports the recommendations of the Housing Commission, which emphasise that housing policy must be based on robust assessments of societal need and should account for the full economic and social costs of not meeting Ireland’s housing requirements. We need to treat housing as long-term infrastructure, with major investment in affordable, well-designed public housing. We all recognise that land costs in Ireland are unusually high relative to total housing costs and one of the single biggest contributors to the high cost of building homes.

The RIAI believes that the government should seek greater control of land values. The national planning framework, NPF, emphasises that the planning system must shift from passive to a more active approach in managing land, but the NPF is a policy document and direct land control mechanisms must be implemented via legislation or regulation and direct funding if this is to happen.

Government support for adapting and reusing existing buildings is welcome. Using properties already connected to services such as water, energy, schools, and shops can quickly boost housing supply, strengthen social cohesion and it is sustainable, but there are several actions required. The first is to accept that existing buildings need bespoke solutions. There is a need to urgently develop a set of building regulations that are applicable to existing buildings. The decision of fire officers and building inspectors should also form precedents that can be consistently used by architects and building owners for future projects. This would streamline the process and minimise costs and waste.

With regard to planning, we believe the planning system needs a new focus. It is dominated by development control. The new planning and development Act offers a chance to move towards strategic, long-term planning, but this requires a cultural shift. Currently, there is considerable time and expense in preparing planning applications that are submitted into a process with no certainty or predictability in the outcome. We need a system that provides clarity and certainty, that is focused on strategic long-term thinking. It needs to move to the true purpose of planning in the interest of public and the common good.

Earlier this year, the RIAI published its planning and development policy which sets out eight strategies to address the current challenges. I will mention two of them. The first is long-term vision and strategy. We believe we need to develop 25-to-50-year statutory development plans that give clarity to the infrastructure that is needed. This system exists in many European countries that prioritise strategic long-term thinking. It gives confidence and allows for resources to be committed to support delivery, is an essential element of any modern planning system and could be put in place immediately.

The second element relates to urban design. With two-thirds of Ireland’s population living in urban environments, we must recognise that urban design is an essential component of modern planning. The current system is based on traditional two-dimensional development plans which can run to even 2,000 pages of policy and maps. They do not provide any vision for what a city or place will become at the end of that plan. It is missing the urban design component to translate these strategies into three-dimensional integrated plans focusing on physical form, streetscapes, public spaces and places that support viable, vibrant neighbourhoods. Every urban settlement in the country should have an urban design strategy based on a data driven analysis of existing buildings, current infrastructure and the natural environment. This will engage citizens, yield public participation and reduce challenges, speeding up delivery.

The last point is in relation to the public procurement system. RIAI members working in both the public and private sectors consistently highlight frustrations with Ireland’s public procurement system where for two decades the emphasis has been on lower, upfront costs and this has been the dominant driver in public building projects. This has led to adversarial relationships and buildings that fail to serve communities effectively over time.

It is also inconsistent with our climate action plan objectives where design choices to achieve carbon reductions or optimum life cycle considerations are fundamental to achieving our climate action goals.

Most building projects have a life span of 60 to 100 years and it is essential that the full project life-cycle cost and quality are driving factors in the tender process. Cheap today, costly tomorrow must not be the legacy of Ireland’s next wave of public infrastructure projects. We have been down this road before with predictable outcomes. We must resource and train contracting authorities to ensure projects are progressed in an efficient manner, with a shift away from bureaucratic red tape and risk-averse decision-making to actively support and progress delivery. In a recent RIAI survey, 50% of practices were shown to be not participating in public tenders. More tellingly, almost 70% of smaller practices are not tendering for public works. Many of these younger practices, the lifeblood of the industry and future innovation, want to contribute but feel they cannot. The EU Commission is reviewing the public procurement directive and we understand that the first draft will be published in early 2026. It is essential that the Government engage with industry to put forward proposals that inform a new appropriate directive that supports the efficient delivery of our public infrastructure plan. Finally, on the matter of building contracts, we believe the current public works contracts are not fit for purpose. They have contributed to an adversarial approach to construction that only results in delays, disputes and additional costs to the taxpayer. This month, the RIAI published the new RIAI Construction Contract 2025, which is the industry standard for the private sector projects. The contract has been developed by the RIAI in agreement with the CIF and the SCSI, working also with the Association of Consulting Engineers of Ireland, ACEI, and Engineers Ireland. It reflects a more collaborative way of delivering our built environment and this is the direction that is needed for the public works contract.

In conclusion, the Government must ensure policy alignment and a co-ordination across all Departments involved in construction delivery, with a view to reducing bureaucracy, inconsistency and delay. This is particularly vital in areas where overlapping and competing protocols are acting as a significant barrier to the progression of work. The RIAI believes these systems can be reformed to deliver infrastructure and housing fit for a modern society, creating resilient, sustainable communities for future generations. I thank the committee.

Gabhaim buíochas le Ms Meghen as an gcur i láthair sin. I remind our visitors that the normal Chair of this committee, Deputy Sean Fleming, is unfortunately not available today so I am standing in in his stead.

I now invite Mr. Bryn Griffiths to make an opening statement on behalf of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland.

I thank members of the committee for the invitation to address them today on behalf of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland on the critical subject of best practice in architecture, planning, surveying and the delivery of high-quality national infrastructure. I am joined by chartered quantity surveyor Eoin Wilcox, and together we speak not only from our own professional experience but also based on extensive research and consultation undertaken with SCSI members nationwide.

As chartered professionals working across all stages of infrastructure delivery, we witness daily the opportunities and barriers that shape Ireland’s capacity to deliver the housing, energy, education, health and water projects that our communities urgently need. Ireland’s infrastructure stock remains approximately 25% below the average of high-income European countries, underscoring the scale of the challenge that is before us. Housing delivery remains particularly constrained, and increasing output will remain extremely difficult unless there is a corresponding and sustained increase in the pace of infrastructure delivery, particularly in energy, water and transport networks that enable development. The SCSI acknowledges the substantial investment made in critical infrastructure in recent years. The focus is now on delivery and implementing infrastructure in a much more co-ordinated, collaborative and risk-sharing approach.

As regards barriers to the delivery of infrastructure, the SCSI has identified some of the most pertinent issues that prevent or delay the delivery of infrastructure. These are informed by our members, who manage, value, procure and specify designs on major projects across the country. The five key barriers include the following. The first is an urgent need for greater clarity and co-ordination in the sequencing of utility connections for new developments by aligning electricity, water and wastewater provision with housing delivery schedules. This is essential to prevent avoidable delays and underutilisation of completed developments.

Second, the high prevalence of judicial reviews in the planning process has become a major factor in delaying development commencements. The urban development zone changes brought about in the Planning and Development Act 2024 should greatly assist with some of the delays in major housing and infrastructural projects. We await the impact of these changes and remain optimistic that Ireland can reduce the level of judicial reviews taken to more typical levels seen across the EU.

Third, rigid funding and procurement frameworks make it difficult for public bodies to respond flexibly or engage effectively with private sector delivery partners.

Fourth, there is a cautious culture in public contracting, where traditional procurement routes are favoured even when alternative approaches could achieve faster or more cost-effective outcomes. While we fully recognise the need for prudence, accountability and value for money in public expenditure, there is clearly a need for greater efficiency, proportionality and flexibility to ensure procurement processes keep pace with the urgency of national delivery.

Fifth, the time taken to move a project from initiation to commencement on site remains excessively long. Delays accumulate at each stage of design approval and, increasingly, within the business case gateway process. These stages provide important rigour and control but in practice can result in between nine and 18 months of lost time repeated several times throughout a project’s life cycle. This prolonged timeline contributes to rising project costs, exposure to regulatory changes, loss of continuity in the design teams and diminished confidence in the project proceeding. Funding that is initially available at project initiation may be reprioritised before the construction stage is reached, undermining delivery certainty. The SCSI believes that these challenges can be overcome through a blend of structural reform and cultural change and we have identified some potential solutions.

Suggested improvements could be introduced to streamline procurement. For example, there is a prevailing reliance on traditional public procurement methods, and the SCSI suggests this should be re-evaluated as these are often overly prescriptive and risk-averse. There is clear merit in broadening the use of alternative delivery models, such as design-and-build and competitive dialogue, which enable earlier engagement between the client and industry to lead to faster, more efficient outcomes. The competitive dialogue process adopted by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and Cork county councils are prime examples. These models allow earlier engagement between client and industry, leading to a faster and more efficient delivery. In both these examples, structured dialogue with developers helped shape deliverable housing schemes across multiple sites in record time. This demonstrates that collaboration and competition can successfully coexist, combining innovation with value for money. Furthermore, the prevailing adversarial culture in public works contracts often gives rise to disputes, claims and costly delays. We recommend a shift toward collaborative contracting, where risk is shared more proportionately and the focus is on delivery outcomes of time, cost and quality. These methods also empower local authorities to partner with external entities such as private developers, housing bodies or utility providers. A flexible framework for partnership would enable local innovation while maintaining appropriate national oversight and accountability.

Finally, water and wastewater capacity must be treated as a front-loaded national priority. This should include a dedicated rapid-response mechanism between local authorities and Uisce Éireann to unlock stalled developments and bring serviced land forward more quickly. To support this, the use of infrastructure heat maps should be expanded beyond local authorities to delivery teams, enabling clearer identification of constraints, better sequencing and more transparent decision-making. At present, many local authorities lack the staffing and technical resourcing to maintain real-time communication with developers, leading to avoidable delays and an absence of clear prioritisation. Strengthening local authority resourcing and improving structured communication channels with the development sector will be essential if we are to accelerate the delivery of local-enabling infrastructure.

In summary, Ireland’s infrastructure challenge is not solely one of funding; it is one of co-ordination, culture and confidence. By embedding best practice in planning, procurement and professional standards, and by fostering genuine collaboration between the public and private sectors, we can accelerate delivery while maintaining the highest standards of quality and value. I thank the committee members for their time.

Gabhaim buíochas le Bryn Griffiths. Bhí sé sin an-suimiúil ar fad. That was very interesting. I now invite Mr. Lawlor to make an opening statement on behalf of the Irish Planning Institute.

I thank committee members for the opportunity to meet with them today. I am the president of the Irish Planning Institute. I am joined by my fellow director, Juliet Ryan, and by the IPI senior planner, Seán O’Leary.

Founded in 1975, the IPI is an all-island professional body representing professional planners engaged in physical, spatial and environmental planning in Ireland, and Irish planners also practising overseas. Our members work in local authorities, academia, An Coimisiún Pleanála, central and regional government, private practice as consultants, with developers and in semi-State organisations. While some of the blame for slow housing or infrastructure delivery has been laid at the door of the planning system, many of these issues are not planning ones. Rather, they are structural, economic and financial issues that the revised national development plan and the ongoing work on accelerating infrastructure have begun to acknowledge.

Planners are not the problem – the vast majority of planning decisions made are to grant planning permission – but the consenting process for large infrastructure projects has become far too complex and it is mired in litigation. This does not benefit communities, developers or, indeed, planners. That said, planning is not perfect. We need to be more open about data, more open about why ideas are not taken up and more open about what policies are not working. When the data tells us something, we need to act much more quickly. This applies to updating the national planning framework, NPF, housing targets, which took too long, for example. Similarly, there are also lessons all planning authorities and project developers can take from the practical implementation and interpretation of conditions attached to planning permissions. All policy and consenting bodies should become learning organisations, iteratively developing their understanding of the deliverability and implementation issues that arise for national infrastructure projects once permitted.

In terms of reform, planners will always support meaningful, evidence-based reforms that support the accelerated, co-ordinated, and sustainable delivery of homes and infrastructure across the country, but good planning takes time to deliver. It is crucial we have policy and legislative coherence. Our members regularly express concerns in relation to the constantly changing legislative and policy basis of the planning framework within which they are expected to operate. Piecemeal continuous reform drives uncertainty and slows down decision-making.

On the common good, while planning is a national competence, it is in effect now subject to both national and EU law and is further complicated by our common law system. We are planners, not lawyers, but are operating within an increasingly litigious system. While some commentators will point out that the level of judicial reviews remains low, what is really affecting delivery is the chilling effect of the threat of judicial review, leading to overly complicated, legalistic applications and decisions and the consequences that abstruse judicial interpretations of planning rules sometimes have on future applications and planning practice. The common good, rather than the vindication of individual rights, is at the heart of planning – both philosophically and statutorily. We have citizens’ assemblies, a national dialogue on climate action, NDCA, and an annual national economic dialogue, NED, but what we urgently need is a national conversation about the common good and being honest about the trade-offs it sometimes requires.

Turning to potential actions before I conclude, I will briefly highlight a number of other potential priority actions that we believe could speed up the delivery of infrastructure and housing. The State needs to identify a list of core infrastructural projects that are of strategic national economic, social and environmental importance. This alone will provide consenting bodies with a mandate to prioritise these projects through the system and give greater certainty to the communities around the country about what is considered essential to the future sustainability of Ireland. Core infrastructure needs to be identified at a national and regional spatial level and not left to local development plans and their zonings. This is particularly the case where such projects can be contentious. Without this, and early public participation, the benefits of ten-year development plans under the 2024 Act will be unrealised.

Infrastructure and land use planning are often treated as separate areas. There is limited evidence of joined-up thinking and infrastructure delivery that should prioritise areas of housing growth and align with planning policy, for example, transit orientated development, TOD, sites and brownfield regeneration sites. Linked to this, infrastructure investment should be linked to NPF growth centres and housing need and demand assessments. In terms of infrastructure provision, we should be working to the higher predicted figures for population growth given the long-term horizon being assessed. It is far better to be in a position where you have the capacity in the system than have the capacity constraining supply.

Utility providers have limited engagement in the development process until such time as a planning application enters the system. This means they are reactive rather than proactive in their engagement on service provision. Earlier engagement, particularly in respect of unlocking large strategic land banks, would assist in this. Many core infrastructure projects will require planning permission and CPOs in addition to EPA licences, marine area consents, etc., and these separate, sequential consenting processes should take place in parallel to shorten the lead times. Consenting bodies and prescribed bodies should have key performance indicators, KPIs, for core infrastructure. This will achieve transparency for all stakeholders and allow issues to be identified and remedied promptly. Required guidelines and national planning statements, for example, the wind energy guidelines, must be put in place or updated as a matter of urgency. Finally, delivery of the NDP requires a well-resourced planning system. Right now local authorities are required to deliver what amounts to a root-and-branch review of zoned land at the same time as they are expected to prepare for new urban development zones, while also implementing other policy and legislative changes.

In conclusion, at our biennial planning awards this September, the Arklow wastewater treatment plant won the overall president's award. Previous attempts to provide wastewater treatment for Arklow in 1993, 1999, and 2005 failed due to a combination of legal objections, land acquisition issues and planning constraints. The success of the final project saw planners play a key role in the strategic site selection, the statutory planning process, stakeholder engagement, compliance management and so on, aligning with the development plan objectives and environmental regulations, while being responsive to community concerns. It is one example of how planning positively contributes to sustainable, publicly beneficial and high-quality infrastructure delivery.

Members of the Irish Planning Institute are ready to play their part in ensuring the successful delivery of infrastructure projects which facilitate sustainable development. I thank the committee again for the opportunity to speak today. We will do our best to answer any questions members may have.

Go raibh míle maith agat faoi sin. I thank the witnesses for all those presentations. This is the most important thing happening in Ireland now. The delivery of infrastructure and housing is having an enormous effect on all aspects of life and this committee is phenomenally hungry for practical advice on changing the existing bottlenecks. We will open the meeting to questions. I call an Seanadóir Stephenson to come in first, please.

I thank the witnesses so much for their presentations. They were really detailed. I wanted to pull in a little about the EU procurement directive mentioned. Obviously, that guides the national level procurement. Do the witnesses have any kind of sense of other European countries where they feel procurement is happening more effectively? We heard about the design and build aspect being built into the procurement approach or the competitive dialogue being built into the procurement approach. We had the Minister for public procurement in with the committee probably about six weeks ago now. He pointed to the national guidelines as the best practice and these working effectively. I will be interested to hear the witnesses' perspective on this topic, the really specific ways it could be strengthened and if there is any best practice in Europe. I know we have this. I know the EU directive is our ceiling, but are other countries using it in a more efficient way?

I thank the Senator. We would certainly see very good examples in Belgium and some Scandinavian countries. The general examples of where it is working well are where there is a really well informed client body with really strong expertise in the work being commissioned or tendered for. The briefs are properly designed, very detailed and informed by good budgets and the appropriate contract forms are selected. It is where the client body is really well educated and really well informed. The other area where we would see projects delivered in a more efficient way is where there is that long-term planning we are talking about. There are plenty of examples. Again, Scandinavia seems to be doing very good work, including in Helsinki and Mr. Browne can talk about this example, and in Copenhagen. They have got very clear plans. This means that when they get to the procurement stage there is an awful lot more certainty in the system. Equally, regarding the resourcing of projects, once they are initiated, they must be properly managed. Even within our current public procurement system, we are getting some very good projects being well managed. It could, though, be done a lot more efficiently and a lot of this comes down to the resourcing within the client body.

I suppose the client body here is composed of the Departments. It could be a Department procuring a particular project such as a hospital, a school or something else.

Exactly. It could be a university, a local authority, etc. That expertise is missing in a lot of those bodies.

Let us take expertise on a national level, and not just relating to public or State funding.

The expertise obviously exists in Ireland but maybe is not being channelled to the right places.

There are certainly expertise there that could be brought in from the private sector or there could be bodies set up within the public sector to help and to act as a resource.

Linked to that is the procurement piece in terms of the ongoing project management from the client side. Do the witnesses think the expertise is there on publicly funded projects they have worked on?

We would see that happen in certain instances and in others, the project teams move so there is not that level of continuity, which is a difficulty. Significantly, for many practices it is the stop-start of projects. When you get down to the detail of it, that has really impacted things like cash flow, resource management and continuity of staff, which one of our colleagues also referenced.

I might add cities like Helsinki, Copenhagen and Freiburg tend to have a lot more autonomy, both in terms of governance and in their financial autonomy. They are the ones that drive development.

In Helsinki, the city delivered 16,500 residences last year compared to 10,500 in Dublin. It has a pipeline of the equivalent of urban development zones, UDZs, of about 50 at any one time. If a developer submits a compliant scheme within a certain UDZ area, it knows it will get planning permission within eight weeks and will have certainty for delivery, which makes a huge difference to the market. It enables building and also avoids the situation we have in Ireland where we are effectively challenging the rezoning at the wrong time- we do it at the planning permission stage. It has happened with SDZs very successfully with the likes of the north docks. It went through the entire planning system and then let individual sites out to tender. They then move forward much more quickly and with much more certainty.

The witnesses talked about the need for well-resourced planning and that the planning expertise is very good in Ireland but the challenge is maybe needing it to be well resourced. Can they give us a sense of where there are current resource gaps? Is that what they are saying in terms of the planning system?

Is that the gaps in resources?

Yes.

Well, An Coimisiún Pleanála is well resourced. It is still recruiting because the workload is growing but it is well resourced. The local authorities on the other hand, have about a 20% vacancy rate and some authorities have significantly bigger rates of vacancies.

The reason for the issue is because during the post-economic crisis period, we basically abandoned planning and had about five graduates a year coming out of the relevant planning schools - five to ten graduates a year. The vast majority of those could not get jobs so they went abroad and stayed abroad. Some have become very accomplished planners in private and public sectors in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and further afield. We have this experience gap somewhere between 2009 and 2013. Even up until recently, my old course in UCD, the MRUP, only had five students in it and that was three or four years ago.

It is now starting to change. We are starting to see students come back into planning and is starting to become a little more of an attractive profession. It is paid very well so it is not pay, as such. People will probably kill me for saying that but that is not the issue. The issue is attracting people into the planning schools. The difficulty and challenge with planning, like any other profession, is that it needs a significant amount of experience. When you leave a planning school, to become a fully rounded and formed planner, takes anywhere from two years plus. We in the institute will not allow somebody to become a registered member unless they have at least two years' experience.

That is the problem; we have this skills gap. We are filling that because we are, thankfully, on the critical skills list after a long time asking. That has happened now and we are seeing a significant interest and uptake in positions from outside as well as within the EU. We are seeing some local authorities taking on several people. Anybody who comes from outside of the jurisdiction to Ireland - same as if you go from Ireland to somewhere else in town planning - the rules and regulations are different. There are a lot of similarities to, say, the UK, US, New Zealand or Australia. Their systems are quite similar but there are significant, subtle differences. It takes about six months from somebody who comes into Ireland and starts working, irrespective of how many years' experience they have, to get enough basic knowledge to be able to be let loose, so to speak, on planning in Ireland.

I am probably over time but my timer is not working so I might steal one last question.

Mr. Lawlor talked about the idea of coming to Ireland and having to relearn the regulations. He also mentioned the challenge of ever-changing legislation. We have seen that. Obviously, we had the big Bill last year, which was enormous, and the new one made more enormous amendments to that Bill this year. It would be interesting to hear from Mr. Lawlor on the impact that has had in the past few years. Mr. Lawlor touched on it but it would be interesting to hear about the impact that has had on how to be effective and efficient.

Like I said in my initial chat, the issue is good planning takes time. If you look at a simple development plan, you could be working on that for up two years in the planning department before it is ultimately published to the members in whatever local authority and then let out to the wider public for comment. If in that two-year period the legislation changes, you are going back and redoing some of your work.

At present, we have certain planning authorities that are working on the Minister's mandate to look again at their zoning in terms of the national planning framework and the new housing targets. At the same time, they are going through a development plan review and local area plan reviews, while also having 20% less staff than they should. If you then introduce a further change on top of that, whatever that change is - whether it is the renewable energy directive that has come out or something else - it becomes insurmountable. To look at the complexity we have heaped into the planning system, when I started my profession 30 years ago and did really complicated projects such as the cement plant in Kinnegad, the Cork gas project or Lansdowne Road, any one of those three projects, which were all enormous, would pale in significance in terms of the paperwork involved by comparison to a 200-unit housing development today.

The amount of paper and detail we are looking for with planning applications has become colossal. The amount of complexity we have introduced into the planning system in terms of legislation has become huge. Even just looking at the size of the 1963 Act, 2000 Act and now the new 2024 Act, they nearly double each time in the volume of not just the paper but the number of rules, and the relationship between those rules. As planners, our role first and foremost role is to interpret that and then put it into practice to make it happen. That becomes very challenging to try to figure out, even with the help of the Department and guidelines, to then implement them into real plans that will have a meaningful change in a community. That is what we are about as planners. We want to facilitate sustainable development and communities. We want to facilitate housing. We want to facilitate sustainable infrastructure. However, if the whole time the rule book is changing, it becomes very difficult.

I might jump in there at this stage.

Obviously, this is an issue of enormous frustration and is having an effect in my own constituency, for example. The Navan to Dublin rail line was promised in 1994 and it will be 2036 at its earliest date. The rail order will happen at a slower rate than it took to build the rail line initially in the 1860s with picks and shovels. That one section of the process is going to take longer.

Looking at the national children's hospital, it is a monument to probably the biggest planning and procurement disaster in this country. There were seven offshore wind turbines in Ireland and we have had more wind energy conferences held by the Government than we have individual wind turbines off the coast of this country and they are now currently being decommissioned.

The more consultation there can be, the better the regulation or legislation will be later. We find that certain Departments and agencies are good at it. We know the pressure people are under to try to get changes in legislation out. However, we see changes come out, often to things like procurement policies, which are well-intended, but the consequences they have for industry are that they delay projects or slow down the tender process. Therefore, the more consultation-----

Does the RIAI get to speak to Departments every year or is it that now and again when a Bill comes out the Departments call and ask it to chat? How does it work?

We contact Departments if there are things we are concerned about and they contact us. However, we have the construction sector group, which is about the delivery of the national development plan and it would be useful to use that as a forum for bringing forward any of the legislative changes, where all the industry can discuss and comment on them. There is so much happening that for any organisation to even try to stay abreast of it is difficult. Therefore a forum like that would be-----

It is the national construction forum.

No, it is the construction sector forum, which sits under the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation.

How much input does the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland get to give to the Government?

It is fair to say it is growing and we welcome opportunities like this to speak to the Government about where some of the challenges are and where we can see improvements. Getting to a point where a regular and recognised group across all the professional bodies can feed in is important because even among the three organisations present, different things affect our members and how we deliver our professions. That is an important framework for it.

We have regular meetings with our line Department, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, and we get the opportunity to chat. However, the way the consultation happens is challenging and sometimes frustrating for all parties. If a Department asks people in generalis what they think and for their ideas and takes from them what it chooses in terms of what might be sensitive and then, when it has a solution does not share it before it publishes it - that is, it does not test it - potentially, it will get frustration and problems. That is what the committee is hearing about. It has happened on a number of occasions.

It is sometimes the publication of policies that do not get oversight or an input from the professional bodies that is difficult

Yes, but it is improving. For example, there was wide consultation on the exempted development regulations. We had a separate meeting with the Department of housing, which was a useful engagement for understanding where it is going. However, one of the things we have seen, particularly with the renewable energy directive, is that it would have been helpful for the Department and practice rather than for us if the Department had come to us before the regulations were proposed in draft and had run us through them. Industry - when I say "industry" I mean everyone in the industry, including Engineers Ireland, SCSI and so on, the people involved in that legislation - would have been able to stress test it and say one bit will not work as well as the Department thinks or ask what the Department is trying to achieve with a certain provision. It is the workshopping that would help and improve it. That is not to say it is not starting to happen; it is.

Mr. Lawlor mentioned the common good in his presentation. It strikes me that there is an economic cycle, a regulation cycle and a needs cycle and we are often not co-ordinated in all those. There was a time when we were phenomenally under-regulated in construction, planning and delivery. We are probably at a time at the moment when we are over-regulated in certain areas of this. We also have a needs cycle and I will give an example. Ideally when building, people build on a brownfield site in a town. It is better to have a housing estate go into a brownfield site close to the centre of town, rather than have it at the edge of a town, which is more difficult to travel in and out of. However, the needs cycle is at a point where we just need houses as soon as possible.

I worked on a building site many years ago and people would come to the boss with loads of problems and he would tell them to just get it up, just to build it. Often we get too distracted by things that are real and important for sure, but that, in the hierarchy of needs at that given time, are perhaps not the most important things. On regulation or red tape within the systems, is there anything the witnesses would strip out or reduce? I mentioned here previously that over-shop living, for example, is highly regulated at the moment with fire regulations and so on. I was raised in a house over a garage that had a 2,000 gallon petrol tank. Do the witnesses see regulation as being too stringent at the moment? Would they make any changes to it in terms of procurement, building and infrastructure?

I will take that. From having been in the industry for 30 years and seen what has happened, we have a huge propensity, when we talk about an issue like overregulation, to add more regulation. The simplest example of this is the Corrib gas project. When it started in 1999 and 2000, it needed three consents. They were planning permission, an EPA licence and a pipeline consent from the Government. By the time it finished, it needed seven. That is because of delays in the process and issues that arose legally and otherwise. The Governments of the day - it went through a number of Governments - decided they needed to put a sticking plaster on the issues. By the time enough sticking plasters are put on, the joint cannot move any more. We are overregulated in certain areas, but part of the problem is that we keep changing the regulations. If we stopped and paused for a little bit to let everyone catch their breath and catch up, rather than trying to fix things, we would get there more quickly. I have been involved in numerous projects over the years. The idea of strategic infrastructure, for example, came out of the first refusal of the Corrib gas project because everyone said it was silly to refuse such infrastructure and that it was too important. Whether people agree with the concept or not, that was the genesis of strategic infrastructure development.

The Dublin Airport noise Act, which is causing huge issues for Dublin Airport, came out of Dublin Airport saying it had a very restrictive condition and that some legislation needed to be put in place to take aviation noise out of the planning system. It ended up with a double laminate of systems that have caused significant delays for all planning applications in the airport. We have a huge propensity, when we try to fix things, to make them worse. We make them more and not less complicated. My best advice to the committee is to leave things alone.

Would anyone else like to speak about the complexity in the system?

We are in the city of Dublin and the vast majority of the upper storeys of buildings are unoccupied or vacant because of the regulatory system. These are buildings that have existed for 100 and 200 years. They are perfectly intact. In London, there is a much simpler system, where if a stairway is only 700mm wide but has been there for 200 years, the fire officer inspects it once every two years to make sure that the fire and smoke alarms are in place, rather than having to redesign the entire stairs and rip apart the building, which would mean it would not be occupied. We need to think about the building regulations as they apply to existing buildings because we have a legacy of hundreds or thousands of potential dwellings that could be brought back to life if we looked closely at how to properly regulate them rather than applying the current building regulations.

I will add to that. As every existing building is pretty much unique, we end up with architects and design teams designing a solution and it is the interpretation of an individual fire or building control officer whether it can proceed. We should be starting to build precedents, as I mentioned earlier.

Decisions of fire officers should be publicly available so that architects and building owners can see it is permissible to do X or Y to a property. The number of unknowns for anyone who owns an existing property means that they very often decide it is easier just to do nothing than to start investing the money in it. I am not saying we are advocating for living over large oil tanks.

Not any more, no.

Just to add briefly that while it is not regulation in that sense, the process of moving a project from its inception through to actually starting it on site is where we see a huge amount of time lost. Again, the process has been put in place to make sure that there is good governance and structure and that decisions are well made. Whether that requires additional resourcing or a different skill set in the decision-making process is something we consider should be reviewed. What tends to happen is that when a project hits a gateway stage that needs a review, a year or 18 months might be lost. Within that timeframe there might be a change in the regulations that the project then has to readapt to and be redesigned for. You move back a little bit before you can move forward again. Something could be done about the speed of the approval processes or the ability to work in parallel to continue a project's progress while it is having its governance checked.

It was mentioned earlier that permits and licences, etc., can be disjointed. Will the new office of housing activation - I think that is what it is called - have the ability to make sure all of those processes will happen in a seamless fashion? I am thinking of cases where a lot of work is done to get the first element, which is the planning application, and then maybe a licence has to be obtained, perhaps followed by a permit, before going into the tendering process. Will the new system play a role in making the process easier?

I hope it will play a role in ensuring that when sites are identified, the projects progress quickly. I would like to come back to the point made about brownfield sites because we have a massive opportunity with them in this country. The level of uncertainty we have at the moment about planning because of people being able to object needs to be addressed. We can look at it in ways that we have seen in other European countries that have proper integrated plans for brownfield areas in towns. These plans are understood by the general public. When the work starts, people are pleased because the plan is being delivered on. When a planning permission sign goes up here, on the other hand, it is often seen as the start of the battle. We need to move beyond that to a situation where there is much more certainty in our system so that people welcome development within their area and see it as something proactive.

I would add that we have done this successfully. As I mentioned, the north docklands is an example of this. We acted for a developer after the SDZ was approved. When planning permission came through for very large schemes within eight weeks, he had the certainty to proceed to develop, which is what developers should be doing. In Helsinki, they have 50 UDZs on the go at any time, so they have a pipeline of development-ready projects under which a developer can make a submission and be guaranteed that if the submission is compliant, they will get their planning permission within eight weeks and be able to proceed. We have done very few SDZs, and they have been done in a sort of "one here, one there" way. We need to start making many UDZs. We should start off with 20 next year and build up to 50 or 60. When we were in Helsinki in March, they were working on 2032. They already had their 50 sites ready to go for 2024. It will take a couple of years for that to be built up but very quickly we could really achieve very considerable progress in delivering large numbers of houses. I have a paper here to give to the committee which outlines how we see that working.

With regard to over-the-shop living, there is a mechanism in the building regulations that provides that when one is dealing with a protected structure, the fire officer is allowed to give a derogation on the regulation. As Mr. Griffiths suggested, there may be a requirement for additional smoke alarms, for example. A process is in place for that kind of derogation process. A fire officer has to do a lot of work to make sure that the premises are inspected so there is a resource issue, but it is an example.

I want to ask a couple of questions. A very good point was made about the strategic housing activation office. We know the Housing Commission recommended a housing delivery oversight executive, which was a bit stronger than what the Minister is proposing. What was in the commission report would have been independent from the Department and, significantly, would have been put on a statutory footing. Does the strategic housing activation office need to be put on a statutory footing in order to enable it to compel State entities, for example, particularly regarding brownfield sites, which were mentioned by Ms Meghen?

I was a member of the Housing Commission, so I feel that the report that was delivered was a very good, strong report. We have yet to see exactly how the housing activation office is going to operate and how it is going to push forward. Having a statutory footing would obviously give it an awful lot more strength. We will have to wait and see. I hope it will move quickly.

I cannot understand why the Minister does not do what he did with the LDA by establishing it on an interim basis and then putting it on a statutory basis. I do not understand the rationale for not doing it. He seems quite reluctant to put it on a statutory footing.

It is set up in the way it is set up. We have to be optimistic that it will start to deliver and deliver quickly but the Housing Commission's recommendation was very strong.

On the idea of 25-year to 50-year development plans, to give a level of certainty around infrastructure, is there an example of a gold standard?

I think Copenhagen would be. Mr. Browne would be more expert on that.

Helsinki is currently working to its 2060 development plan. The development plan has to be reviewed every four years with a 12-year look ahead. They have the certainty of a long vision for their city and they review it every four years and 12 years into the future. I think that is one of the best examples I have seen.

When we talk about planning, there seems to be a conversation, first of all, starting around the common good and the need for a common-good clause in planning. I know there was, notionally anyway, a common-good clause in the Planning and Development Act 2000. Is there a legislative example of a framework around the common good that would work?

I have a paper by the Brookings Institution which I will furnish to the committee. It is about Copenhagen, where a lot of vacant land throughout the city which had agricultural value was used. They were able to increase the value sixfold by rezoning it. The potential future value of the large sites was then used to obtain significant loans from the European Investment Bank. With that, they were able to build the metro from the airport to Nordhavn and then develop an area called Ørestad over a period of 15 to 20 years. They leased the land to the developers, so they clawed back most of the money that was ploughed into it. They have now moved on to other areas of the city to enable development. There is a sort of an ongoing rolling redevelopment of the city, which I think is a superb example.

As a country, do we need to move to legislate for big, important infrastructure projects? I know this has been done in other jurisdictions.

I did a study of the current major infrastructure projects. We have wind projects.

Dublin drainage.

We have the Dublin drainage project, the A5 road project to County Donegal and the Cork Luas, etc.

They have an average currently of about 27 years from inception to estimated completion, as against the Dublin and Kingstown railway, which the Deputy mentioned earlier and which was completed in nine years. The Great Southern and Western Railway from Dublin to Cork got to Carlow in four years and to Cork within seven years, and they built the tunnel into the centre of the city within 13 years. It just beggars belief that we are not performing like that at the moment.

In Wales, they recently introduced a new Bill around infrastructure consenting. It seems to be much clearer in terms of timelines. Do we need a specific piece of legislation in this country around infrastructure delivery?

We really need to come around to thinking about the common good. We have lost that thinking and it is very important that we come back to it. Canada is another example where they have introduced that.

I was thinking that.

It has huge potential to deliver for the needs of society.

We think we have the structure in the planning system at the moment. We have the national planning framework and the regional spatial and economic strategies. The Irish Planning Institute is very much of the opinion that we should be using the RSESs more and there should be regional mapping for key infrastructure projects. It should not be left to county development plans. They are often very contentious. The objectives in the national planning framework should cascade down to the regional spatial and economic strategies. That is where the key economic infrastructure should be flagged. It should be subject to strategic environmental assessment and statutory consultation. That is where stakeholders really need to have that conversation.

I did a county development plan as a councillor before and it was incredibly contentious and detailed.

It is too localised.

Far too localised, yes.

To give an example of where that has happened, in Tipperary their financial contribution has a special contribution levy for any pipework installed that is going to deliver water that originates in Tipperary outside the county boundaries. We could not get more local than that. You cannot have our water unless you are going to pay for it, because it is our water, despite the fact that it comes from the sky. Local issues and politics are local issues and politics. Most of the infrastructure projects Mr. Browne has just spoken about are either of regional or national significance. We need to start that conversation about what the common good is. We need to start it in this room, led by the good members as national politicians. Far too many times through my career I have seen it with contentious applications, what I call the big, ugly, nasty projects such as an incinerator or a dump. They are all key pieces of infrastructure. When we are in college as planners, in the regional planning course in second year we are given a conundrum. An incinerator is needed, let us say for Cork, which is very topical at the moment. Where do you put it? Where do you find that home? We do not have that conversation because we do not get involved in buying into those projects and advocating for them at national level. Instead, local politicians and elected Members, Teachtaí Dála, will come in and say "not in my back yard". They will not even say where it should go. They just say it should not go.

It should go in this mythical place that does not exist and is not near anybody or anything else.

Some offshore. That is the conversation that needs to be had, that difficult conversation about what we call LULUs, locally unwanted land uses. Where should they go? How do we make those decisions and engage communities in getting involved in that conversation? I take the point about 3D planning but it is something of a gimmick to try to get people engaged, in my view. Planning is about engaging with people and having that conversation and setting expectations, exactly as we have said. The same outcome is wanted, to have no surprises when somebody comes and builds something but rather it is what was expected to happen. From my own perspective, unfortunately, I would be very cynical about this. I have seen a three-dimensional model put in front of people and them looking at it. I have seen what is then built and it is identical to the model and still people are upset about their window being overlooked, or the shadow from something.

I have a final question about the core issues with the procurement system. In my very surface-level, vague dealings with procurement, I have noted that there is an obsession with price over value for money. It is all about going to the lowest possible price and then further along, due to uncertainty, construction inflation or whatever, it ends up being tortuous.

There are multiple problems. From a consulting perspective, it starts right at the very beginning. You pick a team. It might not necessarily be the best team for the job. As we were saying earlier, you might have built five schools but that does not mean you have done a good job of the five schools, or that because you have done five, you should get six. There are lots of different reasons. You could be the cheapest on the list. It is not necessarily always the best thing, and not necessarily the wrong thing either. Some of the decision is not evidence based, to use that horrible term again. Then there is an accountability piece. If an organisation makes a mistake of appointing the wrong team, there should be some sort of accountability. A lot of the time, that is what is missing. The mistake gets repeated over and over again. A seminal example of it is the national children's hospital. In that instance, construction was commenced before it had been designed. If you are designing and building at the same time, you get what we got, which is a ridiculously big build for what is going to be a piece of national infrastructure. I will hand over to the real experts on the procurement piece. From our perspective in consultancy, it starts at the very beginning. If you try to scrimp and save with your project team at the beginning, relatively speaking their costs are very small in the overall development scheme. If you put in a cheap team in the beginning, you end up with consequences later.

I think the accountability piece, or the fear of it, has a big impact on procurement decisions. We are seeing lots of good conversations early in projects about trying to do something right, whether that is delivering something faster, or of better quality. People are open to looking at different forms of procurement, different contracts, not using price as the dominant mechanism and actually looking for quality or a design proposal that delivers something faster as the outcome. When you work through the procurement strategies that could deliver that, most of them feel a little uncomfortable for the team involved. They can find themselves thinking, "If I have made that decision and the project ends up costing more, even if it is delivered faster, that comes back on me." The pendulum goes back to what is the really known, well-understood delivery method and that is very traditional.

It is sort of like a cultural thing----

There is a cultural thing that perhaps needs to be released a little bit.

---- of covering your ass.

If delivery at speed is seen as the priority, as long as good decisions have been made, based on evidence that this methodology will cost us slightly more but will deliver two years faster and that is the reason we made this decision, they should be freed of the fear to make that decision.

We want to empower people to make decisions. We want people to be able to estimate risk and be able to live with some risk at times, but we also want there to be accountability if people did not do their job properly.

There is far too much continuous emphasis on the process rather than on what we are trying to produce. Not enough time and effort is given to discussing what the end project is going to deliver, what it is going to look like, how it is going to fit into its community, whether it is delivery for the long term and what its full life-cycle costs are. The process of getting to sign a contract is considered the procurement process, instead of all the effort that goes into delivering the project on site, the contract and the management. That is not given enough consideration when the tendering and procurement process is being set up. Much more effort has to go into that. Somebody was asking about good examples. In Estonia, the government is only allowed to ask the question once, or ask for a piece of information once. They have moved so much to digitisation. In Ireland, practices are repeatedly asked for the same information, albeit in a slightly different nuanced way. If it is not delivered in the exact, correct way for a particular tender, their tender may not be accepted. Hundreds of thousands of hours are wasted by the private sector in tendering for work.

We would say that at the end of the day, all of that cost must go somewhere. We really need to ensure that the right procurement process is set up and that there is consideration of the common good and what the end product will be. That needs a very educated client body. That is where we think that significant change is needed.

"Structured dialogue" was mentioned in one of the presentations, as was "collaborative contracting". Are tenders too big? It struck me a couple of years ago that tenders were so big that it reduced the number of people who could tender, which reduces competition and makes it more expensive. If tenders were to be broken down when they are published or there was an ability for people to collaborate in delivery, it might open tenders to a bigger market of companies to potentially deliver. What are the witnesses' views on that point?

There certainly is a huge opportunity for the public procurement system to consider how it opens itself to new entrants. As was said in our presentation, 70% of small practices are not tendering for public sector work. You need to have experience of a particular project type. That should not be required. Where practices have delivered any type of building project, they should be able to tender because they have that experience of contract administration. The system is too tight. It is not encouraging new practices. It is not supporting innovation, including new building technologies, or supporting innovative sustainable solutions. The system does not seem to be able to encourage that. I would also say that at the larger scale, we hear at the large practice forum that many companies are not tendering for public sector projects. They are working with clients abroad because of the risks to their businesses in dealing with public sector work. Projects do not progress once they are awarded. There are huge challenges with cash flow and staff management because of projects stopping and starting. There is a lot that could be changed within our existing system to deliver better results for the State.

Representatives of the Construction Industry Federation were before the committee. They said that 30 of their 50 biggest companies were working and pushing their staff abroad. That was simply because there was not a clear pipeline of work that was going to be delivered. That is incredible.

I thank each of our witnesses for coming in and giving us their time. We appreciate it greatly. While a number of members were not here, they will have the witnesses' documents and we will encourage members to contact the witnesses. We would appreciate it if, in the future, witnesses could send information to us that they think will be useful. We would gratefully accept it.