Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Vice Chairman is right. The Office of the Planning Regulator has just been set up and is no longer one person. There are 20-odd staff and there will be more. In assembling the team, I would argue that he has taken away too many good people from my Department. In any case, the regulator's job is to implement the national planning framework, to bring an independence to planning, and to track that all planning has been implemented - local, regional, and national planning. The Vice Chairman is right that we do not want to overburden the regulator. There is the independence element of it, but more so from a planning point of view. I refer to the TAPs, the development plan, and the process there. What we decided around that will dictate the regulator's role. There has been engagement and toing and froing with the regulator. I will update the committee on that in our meetings as well. This is not intended to overburden the regulator. The regulator's job is to be independent, certainly in respect of his planning function. That means that the Minister of the day - it is me at the moment - cannot get carried away with themselves and local authority members have to make planning decisions. We have had a lot of good workshops with the regulator and with local authority members, teasing through that new relationship and what all our roles are. People understanding a lot more, and the local authority members are very keen to do it right. It is about watching over all of us when it comes to planning and making sure we are doing our jobs.

The Vice Chairman is right that we have to be careful we do not overburden the regulator with nitty-gritty detail or something else that he should not have to do. It is not the regulator's job to track whether a county manager is doing his or her job when it comes to spending money on Traveller accommodation. The regulator's jobs relates to the planning element.

On the targets, at the moment it involves a request for funding, and we try to match the request. Disappointingly, it does not always happen. I will come back to the reasons for that in a minute. What we are doing now is more similar to the housing allocation process. We are sitting down with local authorities to see what the needs and the demands are, to see whether we corresponding with them and to see what kind of funding is required over a couple of years to make that happen. It is more of a conversation. Ms Tobin is involved in that at the moment, even in respect of next year. It is about moving away from that allocation process.

I have never gotten involved in the blame game, because I am not interested in it. I have repeatedly stayed away from it. There is plenty of research and evidence out there. Everybody has responsibilities here but I want to move on to what we do to make sure it happens. From what I can see, site by site, it simply got too complicated and people got bogged down with challenges and difficulties and things were not completed or finished. Rather than coming back a week later, amending it and moving on, all of a sudden three or four years were gone. There are sites which have been in need of refurbishment and work for 20 years, but it just never happened. It got too difficult to sort out. Even with all the stakeholders, it just did not happen for whatever reason. That is putting it in very simple terms, and everybody has a role in that and everybody is responsible. However, I am not going there because it is wrong to blame local authority members and that should not be the approach. We need to change that and make sure that it happens. If there are difficult sites and complications, we need to deal with them and not shy away from them. We must move on. It is a matter of rights and responsibilities for everybody here, and I keep stressing that. However, we need to move it on as well.

Just because something is challenging does not mean we walk away from it. I go back to what I said earlier that good quality design and good quality construction, with all the services and the bits and pieces that are needed, will certainly help and will make a big difference. We should be high quality here and not what we had in the past.

There was one other question on Part 8. We could find that 24 Part 8s were put through - I must get the figure on how many were refused - but to be honest with the committee, they are not getting to a Part 8 stage-----