NAMA AND ghost estates were the result of a failed planning system, Minister of State for the Environment Ciarán Cuffe told the Dáil.

“We need to ask what went wrong and how we can avoid such dramatically bad planning in the future,” he said.

Mr Cuffe said the Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill, which was passing its final stages, would introduce reform and greater regulatory oversight of the planning system.

All future zoning decisions would be required to be plan-led and evidence-based and should assist in working towards the national interest and efficient use of taxpayer investment in infrastructure. “It is a simple choice between a developer-led planning system or a plan-based one,” said Mr Cuffe.

“Either we take a laissez-faire approach, in which developers call the shots, as happened on far too many occasions in the past, or we co-ordinate our policies and ensure the views of the public matter.”

Responding to Opposition remarks, Mr Cuffe said the Government was not banning submissions on rezoning. It was providing that the strategic issues should be addressed at an early stage of the development process.

“It is not about Mary Mac’s 1.5 acres on the edge of the town,” he said. “It is about the future of the town.” He said he did not want planners facing piles of papers dealing with rezoning decisions in the early stages, when they should be deciding where the jobs, sewers, roads, schools and health clinics should go.

Fine Gael environment spokesman Phil Hogan claimed the Minister of State intended prescribing how many people would live in towns and villages.

When Mr Cuffe denied this, Mr Hogan insisted it was the core strategy. “The Bill is illegal because it seeks to create a framework for planning decisions on the basis of a national spatial strategy that has not been subjected to a strategic environmental assessment or an appropriate evaluation, as required under two EU directives,” he added.

Mr Hogan said the Bill treated personal decisions about where people wanted to live, work and rear families as if they were boxes on a shelf that could be rearranged at the department’s whim.

Mr Cuffe insisted that the Bill allowed local people to make local decisions. “I believe it will result in less intervention from central government because it will allow more robust and sustainable decisions to be made at a local level.”

Labour’s Joanna Tuffy said there was a need to look more fundamentally at planning issues.

“As I understand it, some countries do not allow the type of zoning we allow,” she added. “One can have too much or too little zoning.”