New guidelines on out-of-town shopping centres will come under continual attack and will have to be robustly defended by the Government, a conference on town planning was told yesterday. The guidelines, issued this week by the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, require local authorities to resist large-scale shopping developments outside towns and cities, in order to protect urban centres, avoid traffic congestion and save rural areas from being "stripped" of retail services.
However, delegates to the Irish Planning Institute conference in Waterford were told that guidelines alone would not prevent undesirable out-of-town developments.
Mr Martin Pope, planning director with the Boots chemist chain, said experience in Britain had shown that major food superstores would not give up their attempts to set up in such locations.
He said the British government had taken a strong stance against such developments in June 1996 when it issued a new policy to local authorities, requiring the promotion of development within town centres.
The policy had had the effect of "stiffening the sinew" of local planning authorities to oppose out-of-town planning proposals, but a number of lessons had been learned since it was introduced. Rather than give up on such developments, major food superstores had varied their tactics, using reduced-size formats to tap into the smaller market towns, "and, of course, Ireland has many of these", said Mr Pope.
The wording of the British government's policy document had also come under attack by developers seeking loopholes.
Fortunately, the British government had responded with a series of robust statements in defence of its policy "and I expect the Government in the Republic will have to do similarly".
"The lesson is that it is not enough for the Government to issue planning policy guidance and then go away. The policy must be continually supported as new lines of attack are developed."
Ms Deirdre McDermott, a planner with Brady Shipman Martin consultants told the conference that developers here could be used to subsidise elements of the planning system, as was the case in the UK under a widely-used concept known as "planning gain".
"A developer might be told, for instance, `We want a community centre, and as your site used to be worth £1 million and is now worth £5 million due to rezoning, it is not unreasonable that you should provide that'. In this context a developer may offer a basket of items which should respond to local needs," she said.
