Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

There is a big difference between influence and power and the power is where the decision is made. County councils will not be making the decisions on these planning applications and An Bord Pleanála will now make them. A court-based process like a judicial review is not an appeal process because it does not deal with substance but with technical arrangements around which the decisions are made. There is no real appeals process. A substantial number of the decisions made by An Bord Pleanála overrule a recommendation of the report of the inspector, who tends to be a planner looking at the totality of the issues. I completely accept the need to build communities and to have mixtures of tenure and size etc. in larger developments. There has to be an interventionist approach to deliver that outcome, rather than just a market-led approach. There also has to be certainty within the planning process because that is a driver of costs. There are other ways of reducing the timeline than bypassing local authorities. For example, a local area plan is going through my own area at the moment with large-scale development proposed. It is proposed to zone the land and then include a master plan as a requirement. It will be open to An Bord Pleanála to take a different view on the need for a master plan for a housing development where 2,000 houses are planned in one location and significant risks are associated with that.

Section 9(13) states "Where the Board fails to make a decision within the period referred to in paragraph (a), it shall pay the appropriate sum to the applicant." The sum referred to is a large amount of money. If I am reading it correctly this is a penalty for not producing a decision within a certain timeframe. Where is the funding for this going to come from? Could this not mean decisions will be made more quickly and, as a result, will be more likely to be flawed? Is it possible that this will produce negative decisions arising from caution and a desire not to make a mistake? What is the rationale for this?