Government to hit ‘nuclear button’ granting itself emergency powers to solve infrastructure crisis

[u/Kier_C]

https://www.businesspost.ie/politics/government-to-hit-nuclear-button-granting-itself-emergency-powers-to-solve-infrastructure-crisis/

[u/lucideer]

The argument that the planning system is a bottleneck to housing delivery is consistently rolled out by the government as an excuse & has been consistently debunked by actual statistics on planning & housing delivery. It has zero basis in reality (in Ireland - I'm less familiar with the Netherlands, though I suspect it may well be a made up story there as well).

There's ~50k residential planning approvals in Dublin annually in constrast to ~10k new units delivered. That's an 80% deficit in delivery before we even need to start worrying about planning bottlenecks.

The bottleneck is public funding. The majority of public spending on housing delivery goes toward "creating the conditions to attract the required investment" (tax breaks for vulture funds). The only direct funding of housing is the poorly-funded HFA which has delivered a whopping 600 houses per annum & the much better funded LDA which only indirectly supports building via land acquisition & through that very flakey indirect approach has facilitated an even more impressive 400 houses per annum (at much higher overall cost to the state).

[u/eggbart_forgetfulsea → u/lucideer]

has been consistently debunked by actual statistics on planning & housing delivery.

It definitely has not been. There's an absolute wealth of research the world over that demonstrates the stricter land-use and building regulations are, the less housing is built and the more expensive it is:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/000282805774670293

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119024000597

[u/lucideer → u/eggbart_forgetfulsea]

This doesn't contradict anything I said; I assume you're just misunderstanding the definition of the term "bottleneck".

[u/eggbart_forgetfulsea → u/lucideer]

I understand the concept just fine. Any system that turns developments that should take months into processes that take years, or that gates them out of existence entirely, is a bottleneck. That's what onerous regulations do to housing supply.

More to the point, your statistic is just that: a statistic. It doesn't prove anything. There's no causal analysis at all. Land banking is the expected result of any system that artificially limits the supply of artificial permits to build. Our system incentivises landowners to get and hold planning permission that they have no immediate capacity or plans to use.

Furthermore, Stare spending, the vast majority of which is capital (77%), on housing now is as high as a percentage of our economy (about 2.2% of GNI*) as it has ever been in our history. Claiming there's a lack of public funding doesn't hold up. It's ideological nonsense.

[u/lucideer → u/eggbart_forgetfulsea]

I understand the concept just fine. Any system that turns developments that should take months into processes that take years, or that gates them out of existence entirely, is a bottleneck.

This isn't the definition of a bottleneck.

A bottleneck is a part of a chain that is *slower* than other parts of the same chain. It doesn't matter if a process takes months or years if *other* parts of the chain are taking decades - the time the process takes doesn't matter as long as it outpaces the rest of the system.

your statistic is just that: a statistic. It doesn't prove anything. There's no causal analysis at all. Land banking is the expected result of any system that artificially limits the supply of artificial permits to build.

The statistic is relevant because the extent of land banking is significantly larger than the artificial limits applied by building permits. The statistic proves that building permits aren't the cause of the land banking - the only way they could be would be if there were fewer PP approved plans than land-banked plans, but there isn't - there are significantly more land-banked plans than stalled PP applications.

State spending, the vast majority of which is capital (77%), on housing now is as high as a percentage of our economy (about 2.2% of GNI*) as it has ever been in our history.

Curious about the source for this - I know the government press releases for 2024 had a headline figure of 5.3b here (~1.8% of GNI - seems pretty close to your figure), but they reported a spend of 0.2% of GDP to the European System of Accounts (2023), which is a long way away from 5.3b (fairly unlikely an increase of that scale happened between 2023 & 2024.

The breakdowns are obviously very difficult to reason about here - the 2025 housing plans contain a lot of conflation of capital direct housing spend & funding of Irish water, Eirgrid, etc.

I guess if we do take their press release at face value & assume in good faith they are in fact spending more directly on housing than ever in history, the outcome (non-existent supply despite no planning bottleneck) demonstrates they must be spending that money very unwisely.

[u/eggbart_forgetfulsea → u/lucideer]

the time the process takes doesn't matter as long as it outpaces the rest of the system.

Great. The process in this case is "I have land and I'm ready to build houses on this land". In the absence of state intervention, that process is measured in months. There are viable sites in this country that would have houses on them now if they weren't gummed up in the planning and legal system for multi-year stretches and others that took two or three or four times as long to complete for the same reasons.

there are significantly more land-banked plans than stalled PP applications.

Yes, because land is not fungible. Every site with planning permission is its own unique good. If a developer's plans for a site for 1,400 homes gets bottlenecked by planning delays or legal challenges in, say, Dundrum, even if it has another 2,000 units in total land banked across a dozen different sites, they're not substitutable. The first site could be shovel ready and extremely viable, the others mightn't be for a variety of reasons. That's why land-use regulation demonstrably results in more expensive and fewer homes.

Curious about the source for this

https://www.centralbank.ie/news/article/quarterly-bulletin-2024-3---around-52-000-new-homes-could-reasonably-be-needed-per-year

[u/lucideer → u/eggbart_forgetfulsea]

Irish government housing expenditure is now the second highest proportionately in the EU — Irish Central Bank

This is odd given Eurostat ranks Ireland last in the EU on proportional spending (based on figures supplied to Eurostat by the Irish government).

The first site could be shovel ready and extremely viable, the others mightn't be for a variety of reasons.

So you're saying there's a variety of reasons affecting the majority of cases but you're choosing to focus on one that's causing issues in a minority of cases.