Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It is called The Organisational Review of An Bord Pleanála by an independent review group, February 2016, commissioned by me. There are very good recommendations in it and I want to find out the status of them all. I have a deep suspicion that many of them have not materialised. That would concern me because I felt at the time that there was not much of a pull towards my decision to start this review in the first place. Page 30 of the annual report states the board consented to the quashing of ten of its orders where a procedural deficit was identified. On ten occasions, the board had to quash its own orders which is a bit of an indictment of the procedures. In this report, many of the procedures are updated and improved on so I want to ensure they are being implemented.

The report was not done for the craic. There are some very good recommendations in the report. For example, recommendation No. 61 is that the board must make clear its direction, by reference to paragraph numbers, those parts of the inspector's report with which it agrees and those parts with which it disagrees. That again brings me back to transparency. Where the board disagrees, it should give its reasons for doing so, supported, if necessary, by relevant evidence. In other words, the reasons should not be formulaic. Does that happen?