Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We are spending a lot of time on this but it is the core of the whole thing so we will be able to zip through the other amendments quickly. That is up to the Chair, I am sure we will spend some time on them. The actual powers and the interaction between this office, the Minister and local authorities is key to this legislation. We are trying to get the balance right with democratic accountability, ensuring that planning decisions are consistent with the policy of the Government of the day, whether that is to dramatically increase the priority of climate change, or respond to a housing need, or get a national planning framework and establish consistency around that such as transport and the other things that are needed around good planning, and this is why were are spending more time on this section rather than pushing it to a vote, if people wish to vote on it.

Part VIII is not specifically referred to but the planning, procedures and decision making processes and their review is very much the role of the new regulator's office. If its view is that there is something amiss in the Part VIII system, it will make recommendations to us about that. There will be nothing stopping a member of the public or a political party from writing to the regulator's office to express their concern and ask him or her to look at it and come back with recommendations to Government or the Minister. If those recommendations are there, if we are talking about the teeth in the tiger, the Minster does have real edge to his or her powers to intervene and give instructions to a local authority to change a process or decision. The provision reads: "Where a Minister gives a direction under this section, the planning authority shall report to the Minister the results of the review conducted pursuant to the direction and shall comply with any direction which the Minister may, after consultation with the planning authority as regards to those results, give in relation to all or any of the measures which were subject of a review." The Minister will get a review from the regulator's office, and acting on that is a very direct power or order. Obviously, that should be a last resort.

I agree with the point made earlier that we cannot simply take a patronising view of councillors that we do not trust them to make decisions and therefore the Minister will take charge. We have to find a way to ensure that local councils make decisions and have a way of interacting with a new regulator's office that helps them to understand the parameters around which decisions need to be made and also to require other state entities, for example the National Transport Authority, to be forced to integrate its plans into county development plans so it happens in a seamless way. Anyone who has been to any of the consultations we have had around the national planning framework will have heard me and others talk about the consequences for towns of not having done that over the last 20 years. There are so many towns in commuter distance of Dublin where tens of thousands of people commute every day, spending hours in their cars, without public transport options, having chosen to live somewhere because it is the only place they could afford to buy a house while they work in Dublin. We are surely smarter than that in how we plan for the future.

Deputy Fergus O'Dowd made a number of points about the incentive for some local authorities that may border towns to rely on the population of that town for a commercial proposition that gives them a rates space on the other side of that border and the consequences for town centres and so on. I take his point, and these are the kinds of consideration that we are looking at in the national planning framework and the Ireland 2040 plan. They are also the kind of issues that a new independent planning regulator's office could make recommendations on. If a Minister needs to make unpopular decisions in changing procedures and structures at local authority level, I would not want those to be outsourced to a planning regulator because the political system finds it hard to ask local authorities to change.

This has been a good discussion and we will think about what people have said. If we can look at ways we can add to the wording already there, I will do that but for the moment I will only accept amendment No. 14 and we cannot accept the other Opposition amendments.