Zoning more land than the core strategy allows will not build the homes Meath needs
This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.
There is an understandable frustration in council chambers this autumn. Across the country, elected members are varying their county development plans to zone more land for housing, and many of them feel that the national framework they are asked to follow is the very thing holding them back. That frustration came into the open at last week's meeting of Meath County Council, where councillors urged officials to put forward more land than the core strategy permits, on the basis that no Minister would stand in their way.
The argument has a simple logic. Meath has been given a target of 2,942 homes a year to 2030. Councillors pointed out that the county is well short of that rate, and that landowners and builders have made a large number of rezoning submissions. If the land is there, the reasoning goes, zone it, and let the national bodies say what should come out. One councillor put it bluntly: there is no point telling a homeless family that more houses cannot be built because of a core strategy.
That point deserves a fair hearing. The core strategy was designed in an era when the main concern was too much zoned land in the wrong places, the legacy of the years before 2008 when estates were permitted far from services and many were left unfinished. Housing need today is acute, and the national targets have risen. It is reasonable for councillors to ask whether the figures in their plans still match what the Government expects of them, and to press for a review where they do not.
But the proposal to simply zone beyond the core strategy misreads both the law and the problem. The core strategy is not a guideline that councils may set aside when it is inconvenient. It is a statutory part of the development plan, and the plan must be consistent with the National Planning Framework and the regional strategy. Variations are examined by the Office of the Planning Regulator, which can recommend that the Minister direct a council to remove provisions that are not consistent with national and regional policy. A variation built on the hope that nobody will object is a variation that risks months of delay, and it is housing that would bear the cost.
More importantly, zoning was never the binding constraint in most of our growing towns. Land zoned for housing produces homes only when it is serviced, viable and in the hands of someone willing to build. Water and wastewater capacity, road access, schools and public transport decide whether a field becomes an estate. Zoning a large tract on the edge of Dunboyne, as one councillor suggested, does nothing if the pipes cannot take the load, and it may draw investment away from serviced sites closer to the centre. The same meeting heard that Meath County Council is itself liable for over half a million euro in Residential Zoned Land Tax this year on 32 parcels of its own land. That figure says more about the gap between zoning and building than any core strategy table.
Mayo offers a quieter lesson from the same week. Councillors there tried to add a serviced site at the Quay in Westport to their variation by amending the minutes, after it was left out by oversight. The Chief Executive told them that doing so would legally undermine the entire variation, and that the proper route is a material alteration after public display. Nobody disputed that five houses on a serviced site are worth having. The point was that a plan-making process that skips its own procedures invites challenge, and a successful challenge can unpick far more than a single site.
There is a better path, and it is available now. Councils that believe their housing figures are too low should make that case on the evidence, using the Minister's revised targets, and ask the Regulator and the Department to engage early rather than late. Where land is zoned but stalled, the priority should be the infrastructure and activation measures that make it buildable, together with honest scrutiny of why sites stay idle. Councillors are right to want more homes. They will get them faster through a plan that stands up legally and puts new zoning where services can follow, than through a plan that tests how far the rules can be stretched.
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