Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses from the Department and An Bord Pleanála for coming before the committee. I am glad this is coming to an end, to be frank. It did not help when local councillors, planners, citizens and community groups felt alienated by the process.

I took the time yesterday to look at the review. I made my own submission to the review and the reoccurring theme I mentioned was subsidiarity and making local decisions within planning authorities. City and county councillors pride themselves as guardians of their city and county development plans and local plans. They are right to defend them and I welcome decisions by local authorities, whether it is the executive or members, to defend the plans. It is honourable and the correct course of action. That is really important.

We can look at what was the intention. The intention of the process was to roll out more homes and have a faster, slicker or more efficient planning system. A reoccurring theme in the review that we never really addressed was how we would better equip planning authorities by giving them more planners or resources. We lost that in the debate and we did not support planning departments.

There are cases to be made for synergy and joined-up thinking, perhaps regionally or in grouped councils like those in Dublin. There are imaginative ways to be slicker and to work better, which must be acknowledged.

I welcome the idea that we take the good bits out of this and see if we can replicate them at local authority level.

The witnesses have proven that they can make decisions but who is gaining from these decisions? In most cases, it is the developers. My understanding of the information is that 142 planning applications have been granted amounting effectively to 12,000 houses, 31,000 apartments, 12,000 student places and 208 shared-living spaces, which is a phenomenal amount of accommodation. What are the issues that arise? One core issue is the fact that there was no third-party appeal process. We talk about the Aarhus Convention, subsidiarity and empowering our citizens and communities to engage in a meaningful planning process and that is where the Department and the board lost the goodwill of the public and the planners. We need to go back to that.

I acknowledge that the staff in the Department and An Bord Pleanála went into this in good faith and we have learned lessons on this journey. I am more interested now in the orderly wind-down of this process. I predict that we will have hundreds, possibly thousands of these applications. We will see a substantial increase in December and January and I know this because people have told me so and that is a matter of concern. The lack of a third-party appeal process is the real anomaly here. I would also like to hear the views of An Bord Pleanála on options for speeding up housing development on sites that have been granted stage-D planning permission. Does the board have any suggestions or ideas for speeding up developments? We have a certain amount of sites and we need to speed up their development.