Ms Patricia Kelly:

First, it is necessary to point out that the forestry appeals committee is independent of the Department. To put it into context, the committee received appeals regarding approximately 1,000 licences since it was established in 2018. Of those, some 700 are closed and we now have 339 licences to be dealt with. It is true that the committee was only hearing about 24 licences per month, but since the forestry Act was implemented in October there have been several changes, as members may be aware, to the running of the committee. We now have four committees and they are averaging approximately 60 licence hearings every month. This has had a very positive effect on the number of hearings held, and 191 cases have been heard since November. The extra committees were established on 9 November.

It obviously took some time after the legislation was enacted to get the expertise and the appropriate people in place to set up new committees. The number of licence applications now on hand, which is what concerns both appellants and applicants who are waiting for decisions, is 339. Of those, 164 are already scheduled, including what is scheduled for January. That leaves 175 licences to be scheduled. The current rate of output by the committees is around 60, although they have advised us that this may improve, so we would expect that what is on hand at the moment will all be dealt with by June.

It is also worth pointing out that the new legislation introduced several changes and one of the more positive ones was that the committee can now remit cases back to the Department. This means that cases that might have been cancelled previously are now sent back to us to review and to issue a new decision on. Since the enactment of the new legislation there have been 147 decisions, 82 of which were affirmed and 65 of which were set aside and remitted back to us.