STATE’S NEW LAWS TO SEIZE KEY SITES
Compulsory purchase to back up city housing plan
MINISTERS are to seek beefed-up Compulsory Purchase Order powers for the €116billion homes, that the transport and economic development plan unveiled yesterday.
The controversial prospect of the State getting even stronger powers than it already has to seize private land and compensate owners was announced as part of the announcement of Project Ireland 2040.
Ministers also confirmed a powerful National Regeneration and Development Agency will be established.
This body will push development on State owned lands – in cooperation with local authorities and other agencies – to secure the ‘best use of public lands’ as well as driving ‘the renewal of strategic areas not being utilised to their full potential’.
In the plan published yesterday, the Government said it intends to consider how to advance brownfield development to ‘kickstart its development role’ and said this will include legislating for enhanced powers of compulsory purchase of privately owned sites.
A senior source last night told the Irish Daily Mail a dramatic overhaul of compulsory purchase orders regime is not on the cards, rather ‘tweaks to enable, in the context of the National Planning Framework urban rejuvenation’.
It’s understood these specific CPO powers the Government is seeking to enhance will be geared towards tackling vacant, available and appropriate sites that are currently in urban settings.
As part of the new plan it is hoped such enhanced CPOs would allow the Government to purchase sites which ‘would enable urban rejuvenation’ on brownfield sites, according to a source.
‘We anticipate that most of this land we are talking about is actually in public ownership already. This would be for outliers, the little bits of land that are needed to make much larger sites viable,’ the well-placed source explained.
Using a sample of an urban plot, this source said: ‘The purpose of this new agency is to look at those type of land banks and to say “OK guys, there are 18 acres here where we can put in… it might require some residential, some commercial, there might be a public space on it”. It’s just about making our city cores more dense
‘I suppose where the CPO piece comes in is, for example, in that 18 acres if there was a plot of an acre right, bang, smack in the middle of it which was being held by private interests and was holding up this entire rejuvenation in the city centre... then this new agency could apply for CPO to compulsory purchase that acre to make the whole rejuvenation viable.’
The revelation about compulsory purchase came as the Cabinet yesterday approved and unveiled the new national development plan. It will result in a €116billion injection into the economy over the next two decades to accommodate a forecasted population growth of one million people.
Leo Varadkar led the delegation to Sligo yesterday where the Project Ireland 2040 plans were unveiled amid criticism that the details were not given enough con- sideration. But the Taoiseach heralded it as ‘an ambitious plan for the future of Ireland reimagining our country’ as it is expected by 2040 there will be an additional one million people living here.
Dublin Airport will get a new runway, 550,000 new homes will be constructed and there will be three new hospitals in Dublin, Galway and Cork.
A €2billion fund for urban regeneration and development for the five main cities was flagged as being part of the plan as was improving transport links from Donegal to Cork.
A total of €3billion is being allocated for the Dublin Metro while €22billion will be set out for climate change measures and Cork is set to get a light rail system.
Cabinet Minister Michael Creed said: ‘To be able to put together a strategic coherent both planning framework and capital development plan that will enable us to accommodate a growing population of an additional million people over the lifetime of the plan is really testament to the amount of work that’s being going on on it.’
Mr Creed said the Government was also aiming to have future development balanced regionally.
‘Dublin in the context of urban regeneration will have significant investment but there is also opportunity for the regions, creating a gravitational pull from Dublin along the Atlantic Corridor, along the West of Ireland from Cork to Limerick and onwards,’ he said.
It will be backed by €90billion of Exchequer funding and €25billion from State-owned enterprises.
Population growth of one million