Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Amendments Nos. 276, 277 and 278 are all very closely related so I will take them all together. This relates to the monitoring of the regional spatial and economic strategy. The Bill proposes that "A local authority ... shall, within 3 years of the first occasion on which a regional spatial and economic strategy is made or revised ... and every 4 years thereafter, prepare and submit a report to the regional assembly...".

I also suggest reintroducing something that was in the previous Bill with amendment No. 277, which states that "Each Government Department and their agencies shall, within 3 years of the first ...", which is the same wording that is required for a local authority. That seems to be missing from this Bill whereas I believe it was included in the original planning Act.

Amendment No. 278 seeks to reduce four years to two years. The reason I am doing that is, and we are seeing it at the moment during the revision of the national planning framework, that regional planning is of the utmost importance. In fact, much of the duplication that is done at local authority level could actually be done at regional level. It is time we started looking at how we do our regional planning and the ongoing monitoring of any plan. The Bill sets out there that there should be a monitoring report, but it is important that we do not let the gap between reports get to the stage where we cannot take corrective action. I feel that a two-year overview rather than a four-year overview is the better outcome in terms of everything we are trying to do on a national, regional and local level. I would be interested to hear the Minister of State's thoughts on why it has been extended to four years. I know he is going to say it is because development plans have gone to ten years and the regional spatial and economic strategies are 12 years and that number fits quite nicely with that, but I think the two-year timeframe does as well.

On amendment No. 277, was it the case that there was a requirement for Government Departments and agencies to feed into it? I am not sure I see that in this iteration of the Bill.