Dr. Fred Logue:

We need to look at the ten year development plan and all of the opportunities for it to be varied. The headline is ten years, extendable to 12, with a five-year review but there is also provision for it to be varied when national policy changes as well. Therefore, we could find ourselves in a situation where we have rolling variations which could actually create more work for the local authorities. We need to be very careful about the public participation opportunities in all of those variations. There is a suggestion that there will be an expedited variation procedure but EU law requires a strategic environmental assessment for the modification of a plan and only minor modifications that do not have a likely significant effect on the environment are outside of that. Therefore, it could turn out that in practice there will be much more work, with rolling variations of development plans that may not be very workable. The committee needs to look at this in the round. The headline is ten years but there may be a lot more variations than we are currently thinking about and there will need to be public participation at all of those stages.

The second thing to note is that the current judicial review situation is that developers are judicially reviewing development plans. One third of all development plans in the country are currently under judicial review by developers and landowners. Whatever about the public taking judicial reviews, it is the development plan that is quite concerning for the developers and we need to have a robust system to make sure that the plan that is adopted is secure.

In terms of access to information, I just got an email for a client. A planning application was submitted on 22 February, which was last Wednesday and I asked the local authority for a copy of the plans to be put up online. I got an email saying that the plans are not up yet but will be up in due course. We are one week into the five week period, meaning that 20% of the time is gone, and my client still cannot access the information.