Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Department's officials for the presentation and for coming in to explain this to us today. I have a couple of questions and a couple of observations. The Planning and Development Act 2000 now runs to 715 pages and the supporting regulations run to 609 pages. These are extremely complicated. Even today, I was looking at a Bill related to the Planning and Development Act and thought "Jesus, how many times have I seen this?" There are obviously different variations on the same issues. Access to good planning and public participation means that people should really be able to understand the legislation and that it should be simplified. Is it anticipated that, arising from this review, the Planning and Development Act and the associated regulations will be simplified, shortened and consolidated and that some aspects of them that are out of date will be removed? While it should be borne in mind that the anticipated timelines are not only ambitious, but impossible, this is still a worthwhile thing to do. The Act was set down more than 20 years ago. We have a new and updated national planning framework and many additional complications as a result of ministerial guidelines that override things such as, for example, development plans. It would be worth having a look at that.

I was interested to hear what the officials had to say about local area plans. The statutory basis for these plans is almost too complicated. In Dublin city, for example, a long line of areas are asking for local area plans. What is probably actually needed rather than specific local area plans, which are a mini version of development plans, is statutory master planning for areas. Is it anticipated that there will be a way to work somewhat simplified statutory master planning into local area plans? One of the papers the Department produced looked at a town centre first policy. Village improvement plans are another big part of that as they would give residents some more of a legal basis to follow up on. I use the example of statutory master planning because of how, in my own area of Dublin city, we master planned the Player Wills and Bailey Gibson site in 2016. This plan was to run concurrently with the development plan. However, the developer, Hines, and Dublin City Council then changed the master plan without consultation with local councillors or local communities. When the matter went to An Bord Pleanála, Hines and the council referred to the master plan for this site, which they had just invented themselves. There is a real need for some sort of statutory basis for master planning. That addresses that issue.

Infrastructural planning and master planning is another real issue and challenge. This week, it has come out that the Department of Education has objected to or made observations on at least ten SHDs on the basis that it does not believe it will be able to deliver the number of school places needed. That is the Department's prerogative, right and responsibility but I cannot get my head around why each individual planning application is being taken on its own merits while we are not planning around infrastructural projects. There was a development of more than 900 units proposed in my own area recently. The site really needs to be developed but there is an issue with schools. The site available for the school is too small. In addition, the National Transport Authority, NTA, is building a DART+ project that is to pass right down the road but no stop is to be put in. There is a lack of connection between statutory agencies that are required to deliver individual planning applications. How do we knit all of these together? I do not believe anyone has ever come up with a satisfactory answer to doing that or to making sure it is implemented. I am not sure how many questions were in there but perhaps we could get an answer on the question of simplifying legislation.