Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

One thing that is a sort of pet peeve of mine is that when a large planning application goes in, which involves boxes of files involving boxes of maps; one has people in county council and local authority offices delegated to spend days on end scanning these into a system. Until these staff members do the scanning, the public cannot see this material unless they go down and physically look through these boxes. To me that seems a major waste of time from the local authorities’ perspective in respect of their resourcing, to have to be engaged in scanning, while one then has the public waiting, possibly, up to two or three weeks for that to be done, in order for them to have ease of access. How does Scotland do this? Is the onus on the applicant to do that?