John Cummins (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. Whenever we have a debate about local government it is hugely welcome because all of us in this House fully understand the value of local government. I had the pleasure of serving on Waterford City and County Council for 11 years before being elected to this House. I was elected in 2009 and served two terms as mayor so I like to think I have a good knowledge and understanding of all elements and processes of local government.

There is no doubt about the value that local councillors and local government bring to the lives of people who live in their locality. It is immense. The ratio of councillors to population, as outlined by Senator Black, does not fare well when we compare ourselves to our European counterparts. That is a fact. One of the reasons for this is that we had the abolition of the town councils in 2014 and the amalgamation of a number of local authorities, for example, Waterford, Limerick and Tipperary. Our ratio is certainly lower. This means that the workload for councillors is significantly higher. This has been recognised to some extent with the changes that were made by the previous Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, in relation to remuneration. Other Senators have raised the issue of the additional supports. These are also of the utmost importance. If we acknowledge that we have fewer councillors per head of population, then we need to provide those councillors we have with additional resources to be able to perform the role to the fullest extent.

One significant area is around the development plan process which all local councillors are undertaking, or have undertaken in the last 12 months. This is a significant body of work. The executive will often pit councillors against one another in citing things from the Office of the Planning Regulator or regulations from central government. Councillors lack a capability to scrutinise what is being said to them with good legal and planning advice, independent of what is provided by the executive. When councillors get together and tease out an element of a development plan process and put it up there in lights to be adopted, it often emerges after it has been adopted that it has been accepted by the Office of the Planning Regulator. This goes to show that some of the things that have been said by the executive to local councillors are not actually the case. They need to be empowered with independent advice to be able to carry out effective scrutiny.

The fact that the LPT is determined independent of the budgetary process is an issue I have been raising for a long time. That councillors are asked to make a decision on lowering or raising the property tax independent of the wider budgetary context is a completely false analysis. This has to be done by councillors across the country. The reason given is that the Revenue Commissioners need to be notified by a certain date so that they can have letters sent out. These processes need to be brought together because trying to ask councillors to make decisions on the LPT, which are intrinsically linked to a budgetary process that happens two months later, is not fair on them. It does not give them the opportunity to make informed decisions about the process.

I will make a pitch on a matter I have spoken to the Minister of State about previously. Given the context of the budgetary circus we have at the moment, I firmly believe we need to look at putting additional discretionary block grants in place for every local authority, particularly in relation to housing adaptation grants to enable them to be able to get to the bottom of their list. There is no reason we cannot do that now, given the surpluses, the capital expenditure and the fact that this is one-off spending. I ask the Minster of State to take that on board.