Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This follows on from Deputy Ó Broin’s comments about egregious breaches and more minor breaches. I fully accept Mr. Ryan's point that it is very difficult to define. Sometimes it is very obvious what an egregious breach is but it is different when we start looking for details. I accept the difficulty. However, sometimes the speed of the response is a barometer of how we react to it. Certainly, from the perspective of many public representatives, when a planning enforcement issue is reported at local authority level, there is often not a speedy response.

I have two questions, first, on the area of resources and how those planning enforcement operations are enforced and, second, the long lead-in times that often result from the enforcement process itself. I believe it dilutes the confidence people have in the planning process if they see what they believe to be a very significant breach either of a new planning permission that has been granted which, during the construction phase, is deviating from what is permitted, or, second, where something begins trading or operating that does not have any planning. This relates to that commercial calculation Deputy Ó Broin raised, whereby people trade it out and they make their money while they are operating in the gap. The speed of the response has to be addressed by the review as well.

Let us say there is a significant breach of either a new planning application or a new activity that is taking place on a site. An immediate response often assures residents that the matter is being taken seriously, whereas the failure to have an immediate response leads them to believe that nobody cares and, therefore, the matter will not be dealt with seriously. We need to have timelines around the initial reaction to complaints. I accept we also get complaints that are not genuine or that are erroneous and so on. However, if local authorities were able to react more quickly, if they had the resources and if there were tighter timelines on how they should respond, it would give people more confidence in the overall enforcement process. A quicker initial inspection and acknowledgement of a complaint would give people confidence that a process had started, as opposed to nobody listening. I ask that those points be taken on board in the review.

If the Department has any issues around the allocation of resources to those enforcement activities, I would be interested to hear if there is consideration of that. I imagine the Department is undertaking a legal process but enforcement is very important. There are a lot of Dublin City Council by-laws in my area that are never adhered to because we do not have enough enforcement officers, which is something to think about.

The second area in discussion paper 4 is the planning bodies. I note the first discussion point concerns the corporate challenges facing An Bord Pleanála and the Office of the Planning Regulator, OPR. I think we could have a full session on that but I do not want to drift into existing inquiries. I will ask a broader question. Is the Department looking ahead at issues that might come out of any investigation to try to ensure the public has confidence in the planning bodies? For example, the strategic housing development, SHD, process really rocked people’s confidence in the planning system. They felt like something was being taken away from them and their local representatives in order to make more speedy decisions, and all that happened was that we pushed all of the objections into the more expensive and difficult area of the courts instead of being able to resolve things or give people their say at an earlier stage. My question concerns the corporate challenges for An Bord Pleanála. I note the Department is not recommending significant changes to the OPR or An Bord Pleanála but I have concerns that An Bord Pleanála is sometimes seen to be too removed, or too independent is perhaps the term.

I will cite the example of the local area plans. Local authorities put a huge amount of money into these plans and some local area plans cost the best part of €250,000, with consultation and so on, yet very little reference seems to be made to them by An Bord Pleanála when decisions are being made, and very little reference seems to be made to the clustering of decisions that An Bord Pleanála makes. When local authorities make decisions, they regularly say, for example, “There has been significant development in this area and we are referencing the local area plan”. An Bord Pleanála tends not to take that kind of holistic view and – again, this is my own experience of it - it tends to examine the case in front of it without examining the impact on the community, which local authorities are very good at.

My second question concerns that whole area of giving assurances to people that they have some ownership of An Bord Pleanála and that An Bord Pleanála in some way references back to the structure of the council and the elected members. One of the problems An Bord Pleanála has is that people do not have faith in it because they do not believe they have any stake in it. I do not know how we get around that and whether there should be some community voice within An Bord Pleanála, but it is very much seen as a structure that is independent and separate. That is for all of the right reasons that we need, but it does not do anything to give confidence to the community that they have at stake in it. I have covered a few areas there.