A permission that is never built is not a home: why the planning pipeline needs watching
This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.
For most of the past decade, the argument about housing in Ireland has been an argument about the planning system. The charges are familiar: too slow, too uncertain, too exposed to legal challenge. Deloitte's latest Crane Survey, reported this morning, offers a useful corrective. It does not say the planning system is the only problem. It says something more uncomfortable: that even the permissions we already have are not reliably turning into homes.
The headline figures are stark. Deloitte expects about 40,000 homes to be completed this year, a 10 per cent rise on 2025 and the highest level since 2008. That is real progress and deserves to be said plainly. But the Government's target is 300,000 homes by the end of 2030, which would leave around 260,000 to be built in four years. On Deloitte's reading, the State is on course to fall short by somewhere between 123,400 and 136,100 homes.
The reasoning behind that estimate matters more than the number. Over the last five years, 182,130 homes have been granted planning permission. Yet Central Bank analysis suggests that between a quarter and almost a third of permissions never commence at all. Apply that lapse rate, and the pipeline shrinks quickly. Add the usual delay between a grant and a first sod being turned, and it becomes clear why the report describes the next 12 to 18 months as critical.
For planners, this should shift the conversation. A grant of permission is often treated, in political debate and in council reports alike, as the finish line. It is not. A permission is an option to build, and options are exercised only when the numbers work: when finance can be raised, when construction costs are matched by achievable prices or rents, when water and wastewater connections are available, and when the developer has the capacity to start. Where any of those conditions fails, the permission sits on a file until it expires.
There is a further caution in the report. Deloitte notes that this year's strong completions owe something to the temporary waiver of development levies introduced in 2024, which requires homes to be completed by 31 December 2026. A deadline of that kind pulls activity forward. When it passes, some of the momentum may pass with it. It would be a mistake to read any dip next year as proof that planning reform has failed.
The counter-arguments deserve a fair hearing. The Government can point to rising completions, and yesterday the Department reported a 57 per cent rise in what it now calls Starter Home Supports, with Cost Rental delivery more than doubling in the first half of the year. Forecasts are not destiny, and the lapse rate drawn from earlier years may not hold in a market with more State involvement through the Land Development Agency, local authorities and approved housing bodies, which do not walk away from permissions in the same way. All of that is true, and the Deloitte figures should be read as a warning rather than a verdict.
But the warning points to practical work. Councils already record commencement notices; that information should be brought together with grant data, regularly and in public, so that everyone can see how many permitted homes are actually under way in each county and why the rest are stalled. Where the obstacle is infrastructure, the answer is targeted investment in water, wastewater and transport, programmed alongside zoning rather than after it. Where the obstacle is viability, the honest response is to say so, and to decide openly whether the State will close the gap through cost rental, affordable purchase or direct delivery.
None of this is an argument for granting less, or for weakening the scrutiny that good decisions require. Ireland needs a steady flow of sound permissions in the right places. It is an argument for measuring the right thing. The number of homes permitted is a measure of the planning system's output; the number of homes started is a measure of whether that output is useful. For as long as a quarter or more of permitted homes are never built, the State is not short of permissions so much as short of the conditions that turn them into front doors.
The next year and a half will show whether the recent rise in completions is a turning point or a peak shaped by a deadline. Planners cannot control interest rates or construction costs, but we can insist on clearer evidence of what happens after the decision is made. That would be a modest reform, and more useful than blaming the system for homes it has already approved.
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