Anthony Neville has spent more than 20 years trying to secure planning permission for 345 new homes on a site he bought in Co Kildare in 2004.
The site sits on Dublin’s commuter belt. It is situated 300 metres from the Sallins railway station, which has 30 trains a day in and out of Dublin’s city centre – a 30-minute journey. He has the staff, the finance and the capacity to go ahead with the build, but there is one major problem.
“The planning history on it is just unbelievable,” Neville says.
The story of planning delays at his site in Co Kildare typifies a central frustration of small- to medium-sized builders in Ireland who are trying to build more homes in a housing crisis when delivery has fallen well short of what the country needs.
A number of these builders spoke to The Irish Times this week at the Housebuilding Summit organised by the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) and the Irish Home Builders Association to explain what is holding them back.
“From 2004 to 2009, we waited on the outer ring road to be done. From 2009 to 2019, we waited on the wastewater system to be put in place. From then right up to now, we have a core strategy settlement cap of 100 units in the whole area of Sallins,” says Neville.
“The authorities in this country believe that it shouldn’t grow any more.”
A core strategy settlement cap is the limit on the number of homes that can be built in a certain area.
The number is published in the local authority’s County Development Plan, which is guided by the National Planning Framework (NPF).
The NPF was published in 2018 and its housing targets are based on 2016 census figures. The population has grown significantly since then, meaning the assessment of housing need in certain areas may be long out of date.
While a revised NPF was signed off on by the Government this week, it has yet to pass through both Houses of the Oireachtas. When it does, the various councils will then have to reopen their County Development Plans to revise housing targets, settlement caps and rezone land.
“It’s moving at a glacier pace ... I don’t know if I will be retired before I see the effects of it,” Neville says.
Anthony Neville Homes was established in 2008 and builds between 120 and 150 homes a year.
It is one of several small-scale developers in the country that is struggling to scale up into a larger player and deliver more badly needed homes.
“We would have infrastructure and resources in place from head office to do more than that, but we’re running at about 70 per cent of our capacity, and have been for the last few years, just simply because we can’t secure the pipeline of work,” Neville says.
He estimates his company has a land bank across Kildare, Wexford and Kilkenny with the capacity to build 1,312 new housing units, but none of these may have secured planning permission by January next year.
“There’s a very clear possibility that we may not have planning on any of those, or that they could be in the judicial review process or have various different complications,” he says.
While securing planning permission is one problem for these smaller builders, getting access to finance to scale up their businesses is another.
Banks are still reluctant to lend to the industry post-crash and interest rates have risen significantly since 2022.
Finding enough equity – the cash to fund a project – to get a builder over the line from the purchase of the site through to the approval of a bank loan at the building stage is a big blocker in terms of scaling up output.
Banks could play a far more significant role into the future. They have to get involved more in the sector. [But] the extent of how much more to get involved is probably limited to ensure they’re not overly exposed
Alan Brunton is director of Ashcroft Property Development which builds about 50 houses a year largely in Dublin and Meath.
If he were to scale up his business, he would have to source outside investment because the banks would not lend money in order for him to purchase land, he says.
“The banks will only lend you the build cost. It will not lend you money on zoned land. It has to have planning permission,” says Brunton.
“So let’s say, if we do want to purchase land, we have to drive together a team of investors to actually purchase it, and then we have to get the planning permission, and then we go to the bank.”
Conor O’Connell, the CIF’s director of housing and planning, says that, while banks have a bigger role to play in the crisis, attracting foreign investment back is also essential to “filling the gap” that is funding apartment development.
“The banks could play a far more significant role into the future. They have to get involved more in the sector. [But] the extent of how much more to get involved is probably limited to ensure they’re not overly exposed,” he says.
Brian McKeon is director of MKN Developments, which builds mainly apartments in the Greater Dublin Area.
While the company used to build houses, it focuses on apartments now because it cannot compete with the larger publicly quoted developers for land purchases.
“They need the supply to keep their shareholders happy, so say they’re willing to pay more than what we’d be willing to pay,” McKeon says.
Alan Brunton shares the concern.
“There is a terrible shortage of zoned land, and it’s inflating the price of land. Sites with planning are like hens’ teeth,” Brunton says.
McKeon also stopped searching for housing sites because the company bought a piece of land in north Dublin that he felt was going to be its “golden egg”, but the planners had different ideas.
The 16-acre site in Swords is close to where the Metro North will eventually stop and is 300 metres from an existing site on which the company is currently building 82 apartments.
MKN Developments bought it in 2018 with the intention of building 1,000 units on it, but six years later it is still caught up in the planning process.
“Irish Water said, after about 18 weeks, that there was only capacity for 300 units on the site, so we had to carve it up into phases and rewrite the script,” McKeon says.
The company applied for planning permission for just under 300 units through the Strategic Housing Development application process.
That application sat with An Bord Pleanála for about 18 months and was granted permission, McKeon says, before being appealed for a judicial review, where it spent three and a half years.
“It has now come out of judicial review and is back with the board, and at this moment in time [we’re] keeping everything crossed that my guardian angel might see a grant. But the odds, unfortunately, seem to be stacked against us.”
While securing finance and navigating the planning system are two major obstacles these builders face, getting basic services such as water, roads and electricity to the sites is another huge stumbling block.
All of the builders who spoke to The Irish Times detailed instances where they had spent years trying to secure wastewater treatment upgrades, increased water supply capacity or road upgrades.
Each issue had to go through different bodies to be resolved before planning permission was possible.
“Ireland seems to have no land management system and everybody’s working as a separate silo,” Brunton says.
A lack of genuine partnership between builders and local authorities on zoning, services and planning appears to be stunting the growth of the industry and, in turn, the supply of new homes.
These issues are even more acute for the small- to medium-sized builders, without whom the current crisis cannot be solved, O’Connell says.
“We need housing to be delivered everywhere. It can’t just be apartments in city centre locations. It has to be your suburban units, regional towns and urban centres as well,” he says, referring to construction work largely done by smaller builders.
“The main blocker at the moment for the smaller builders is getting their hands on the land, because it’s just in short supply, and connecting to the infrastructure, because there’s so much capacity constraints, and getting through the planning system,” O’Connell says.
While the Government works on expediting planning reforms and establishing a dedicated Strategic Housing Activation Office to get more land zoned and serviced, these smaller builders remain frustrated at one simple fact.
They feel they have the capacity, the resources and the will to build more houses in the midst of the crisis; they just can’t get the help they need to realise it.
