Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 648:

In page 212, between lines 19 and 20, to insert the following: “(10) When making an application for permission under this section, the applicant shall upload the application, and the accompanying documentation, on a website maintained by or on behalf of the planning authority.”.

This relates to when a planning application is made and the planning documents being published online. I am seeking in amendment No. 648 that when someone is making a planning application, the applicant would upload the application and accompanying documentation to a website maintained by the local authority or on behalf of the planning authority. We currently have a situation where what can happen with planning applications is the documents can be prepared, usually by a professional, and are then sometimes printed out from prepared PDFs and sent in the post or delivered in hard copy to the planning authority. Then, on receipt of the documents after a number of days, because it is labour intensive, the documents can be scanned into PDFs and then uploaded onto the planning authority's website so they are available to the public to see. That is quite labour intensive, especially in the case of large applications with amounts of documents, but also anyone who has looked at planning applications will notice the quality of the PDFs available to the public is often very poor. Therefore, even though the original documents prepared by professionals could be of high quality and you could zoom in on the documents and so forth, because these are scanned documents they are then of poor quality and it can be difficult for members of the public to zoom in on drawings, maps or whatever to get the detail. They are low quality, scanned PDFs which take considerable local authority resources to scan. Given we are in 2024 and this Bill is the legislation we are told will be in place for the next 20 to 25 years, surely it would be appropriate at this stage to have a modern system for the lodging of planning documents and one that is efficient in terms of local authority and planning authority resources and that improves public access to the original high-quality PDFs, drawings, maps and so forth. It can be an issue with planning applications sometimes, because if the PDF uploaded is a low quality scan, sometimes important details are illegible. This amendment would address that issue.

Amendment No. 649 is related to this and simply reads "The time period prescribed for making a submission will commence when the planning documents are made available [online] to the public". If amendment No. 648 is accepted, this would be instant so it would not cause any delays. There is an issue at the moment where planning lists sent out by local authorities can be up to two weeks in arrears between the application being submitted and the documents being scanned and making it onto the planning list. In terms of Aarhus compliance, it states that the clock should start ticking at the point when everyone is notified. When a planning list goes out, that would be the time the clock should start to tick, according to the Aarhus Convention. If my amendments Nos. 648 and 649 were agreed together, it would be an efficient, modern way to address this issue which would give the public better access to planning documents and would create efficiencies at local authority level. This issue came up during the pre-legislative scrutiny process and there was quite a bit of discussion on this and related matters.