What does it mean to proclaim national targets for housing supply or for renewable electricity when the capacity to frustrate these objectives resides outside central Government?

The planning regime is decentralised at its core when the prime mover, in framing development plans and in approving or blocking land-use changes, is one of the 31 local authorities.

Appeal processes go through independent arbiters, ultimately the courts, in this country but also in the UK, whose decision-making structure was copied in the 1963 Planning and Development and its successors.

Government policy in Ireland and the United Kingdom on the planning regime for essential infrastructure is, however, about to diverge sharply. In neither country has the priority attached to housing and to renewable energy been reflected in actual decision-making by local authorities, while central Government carries the can for unaffordable housing and slow decarbonisation of the energy system.

Ambitious targets are not a substitute for delivery and the new Labour government in the UK has been quick to announce policy changes in both housing and renewable energy.

They will bring central and local government into conflict and will have an inevitable impact on policy in this country. Delays in the planning system have made Irish Government targets for housing supply unattainable in recent years.

Policy response

The policy response has been to raise the target, most recently from the 33,000 per annum actually delivered in 2023 to the 50,000 announced in April, without accompanying reforms designed to expedite the planning process. This would require adequate zoning with easier planning permissions and this failure of reform risks further years of under-achievement.

The new target of 50,000 is below the range identified by the report of the Housing Commission and there are concerns that prices and rents will continue to rise even if the new target could be delivered.

Without pressure on the local councils, the gatekeepers for land-use reassignments under both British and Irish planning systems, housing supply will remain tight and well below demand in the areas of greatest need.

The position is much the same when it comes to the rollout of renewable generation and the necessary grid connections.

Responsibility rests with central Government, reduced to the role of cheerleaders for ambitious national targets, while the key decision-makers are local councils and the apparatus of planning appeals and judicial review.

The UK government has signalled that power will return to central Government and the stage has been set for political conflict.

The de facto ban on new onshore wind turbines, favoured by the outgoing Conservative government, is being abandoned and there will be residential zoning targets for local councils. Those which decline to meet them will face budgetary consequences – local councils in the UK rely on financial support from the national treasury as they do in Ireland.

Labour’s big majority was due in part to Conservative losses in the south of England where the preservation of the green belt around London and other urban centres is favoured by the Tories and by many new Liberal Democrat MPs, but where Labour has fewer seats to lose.

Major blockage of housing

If the UK government, secure it would seem for a full five-year term, takes on the nimbyism which it has identified as the major blockage in housing, its example will have an impact in Ireland. As will the more vigorous approach to the rollout of low-carbon infrastructure in the electricity sector, in both generation and transmission, to which Labour has committed.

Extra renewables imply a big investment in the grid, which means more pylons in rural areas as well as transformers

There are even a few Labour MPs in East Anglia threatening rebellion about new high-voltage transmission lines.

Irish ambitions have been reviewed in a recent report from the Irish Academy of Engineering, which notes that deployment of onshore wind is well behind target.

Onshore wind is the cheapest available renewable technology and solar is financially viable too, but developments are far too slow to make the Government’s 2030 targets credible.

Extra renewables imply a big investment in the grid, which means more pylons in rural areas as well as transformers.

Eirgrid has been unable to do what is needed to make Government targets realisable.

Pylons now attract as much opposition as onshore wind turbines and the resistance of local residents to development is no longer confined to housing in and around the cities. Something’s got to give, or central Government in Ireland will have to concede that it does not have viable plans for either housing supply or low-carbon energy.

In the UK, the new government has already begun to face the music and the local political rows which will follow. In Ireland, political movement may have to await a general election, but a conflict between national and purely local concerns has been embraced in the United Kingdom, where Starmer’s government has accepted that you can have too much free-riding local democracy.