Member's statement: Planning System: Delays

Member's statement by Mr Peter McReynolds on 1 April 2025.

MLA: Mr Peter McReynolds
Party at the time: Alliance Party
Date: 1 April 2025
Type: Member's statement
Business: Members' Statements
Heading: Planning System: Delays
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 4876513

Text

I rise to highlight major ongoing and systemic issues in the planning system, which I have raised repeatedly as a member of the Committee for Infrastructure. When the Assembly, thankfully, returned last year, one of the first motions was on the planning system. Sadly, more than a year later, we are no further on, and it is three years since a 2022 Northern Ireland Audit Office report concluded that the planning system was:
"not operating effectively ... and in many aspects not delivering for the economy, communities or the environment".
That is holding back investment by local businesses, and will hold us back from meeting our climate targets through encouraging more investment in low-carbon electricity supply and developing EV charging infrastructure. At the same time, as with everything that happens in Northern Ireland, the world keeps turning without us. The UK Government have made planning reform central to their growth agenda, with forecasts suggesting that proposals will deliver 170,000 homes by 2029-2030, and grow the economy by £6·5 billion through job creation and economic growth. Businesses have told me personally, as I have said at the Committee, that if it was a choice between here, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, we would not win the battle to attract investment because we are simply taking too long in comparison with other places. At the same time, housebuilders cannot even get a connection to waste water infrastructure because we have allowed Northern Ireland Water to get into the state that it is in due to our outdated approach to funding water infrastructure. We then react in shock, in this place, that underfunding it for years has led to there being human faeces in Belfast lough and on our roads, as shown in last year's 'Spotlight' programme. When the planning statistics for the third quarter came out a few days ago, I did not have much hope, and I was not surprised when I saw that local applications take nearly five months to process and that major ones take closer to 10 months. My experience is that seeking basic road licence instructions has taken almost three years this month and is still ongoing. Report after report after report stack up saying the same things, but nothing seems to change. I have said it before: the Infrastructure portfolio is not sexy and will not get headlines. However, it is fundamental to what we seek to achieve in the Programme for Government: build more homes, create more jobs and tackle the climate crisis. It needs to start being taken seriously in the Department, because talking shops, working groups and presentations are not correcting the basic issues with our planning system. Alliance believes that we need to see a fully resourced system; planners triaging applications and then being accountable to meeting deadlines from the date that the application was accepted; prioritisation of economic and green energy applications so that they do not get logjammed in the system for simply far too long; and empowerment of planners to actually take decisions rather than endlessly and repeatedly consulting and re-consulting. The time for talking is over, and the time to act is now.

526 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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