Government moves to lock in smaller apartment standards while EU court question is pending
This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.
Housing Minister James Browne is expected to bring a National Planning Statement on apartment design standards to Cabinet today. If reports are right, its content will closely follow the apartment guidelines published in July 2025, which reduced minimum floor areas, allowed more studios, required fewer windows and balconies and dropped the requirement for indoor communal or cultural facilities. What changes is the legal vehicle. The standards would move from Ministerial guidelines under section 28 of the Planning and Development Act 2000 to a statement under section 25 of the Planning and Development Act 2024, whose provisions on such statements were commenced in October 2025.
The timing matters because the 2025 guidelines are still before the courts. Councillors Darragh Moriarty, David Healy, Dan Boyle and Pádraig McEvoy, together with the late Frank McDonald, argued that the guidelines should have been subject to strategic environmental assessment before they were adopted. In December 2025, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys proposed referring questions on the Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive to the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the case has since gone to Luxembourg. The questions go to the heart of what counts as a plan or programme: whether design standards that affect the number and internal layout of units, but not the number or location of developments, are within the Directive, and whether it matters that a decision-maker must have regard to a document rather than comply with it.
The Government's answer is to do the assessment anyway. The draft statement was published in June with an SEA environmental report and put out to public consultation, so the new instrument should be on firmer ground than the guidelines it replaces. Whatever the Court of Justice decides, a statement adopted after environmental assessment and consultation is less exposed than guidelines adopted without one. The Minister is entitled to want certainty, and Cairn Homes' submission to the Oireachtas housing committee this week underlines why. Its chief executive argues that the national target of 50,000 to 60,000 homes a year cannot be met unless roughly half of all new homes are apartments, given the density requirements that now attach to most zoned land.
For practitioners, the shift is more than a change of label. Section 28 guidelines can contain specific planning policy requirements that planning authorities and the Commission must apply in their decisions. Under the 2024 Act, development plans and regional strategies must be materially consistent with the national planning policies and measures in a statement and take due account of its guidance. Applicants, council planners and inspectors will need to read the final text carefully to see which standards are framed as binding policy and which as guidance, and how the transition from the old guidelines is handled for applications already in the system.
There are reasonable objections. The first is about quality. Apartments built now will be lived in for generations, and floor area, light and outdoor space are not easily retrofitted. Smaller units may help viability on paper, but Ireland's past experience with poor apartment stock should make anyone cautious about treating standards as the main lever on cost. Construction costs, finance, land values and the lack of buyers at the prices needed are at least as important. The second is legal. Moving to a new instrument does not make the referred questions disappear. Permissions granted in reliance on the 2025 guidelines may still be argued over depending on how the Court of Justice answers, and it would be unwise to assume that question has been settled by today's decision.
A third point is one of process. Nothing prevents the Government adopting a statement while a reference is pending. But it sits awkwardly with the State's own position that the guidelines did not need assessment at all. Carrying out SEA now is, in effect, an acknowledgement that it is the safer course, a lesson worth applying as other statements replace the remaining section 28 guidelines.
On balance, putting apartment standards on a statutory footing with environmental assessment and public consultation is the right direction, and certainty has real value for housing delivery. Standards should still be judged on whether they produce homes people want to live in for decades, not only on whether they make schemes stack up this year. The final text and the environmental report deserve close reading, and the Court of Justice's eventual answer will still matter for how Ireland makes national planning policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment