Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I support amendment No. 3. I do not want to repeat the arguments I made on the Second Stage debate, but at that point I had raised my concern that the evidence presented to members suggested there were alternative ways of shortening the length of time it would take for the 15 large planning applications that were cited on the spreadsheet to be processed. There are on average 33 weeks spent of pre-planning and I questioned whether consideration was given to tightening up the statutory timeframe for pre-planning within the existing local authority decision framework. Equally, it takes an average of 29 weeks for the local authority to make the decision in those 15 cases, and about half of that time has been as a direct result of the length of time it has taken the applicant to come back with the additional information requested. When one removes that average ten weeks response time to requests for additional information, it brings it down to 19 weeks, which is the same time as a decision from An Bord Pleanála.

When looking at the average time of 19 weeks for a decision from An Bord Pleanála it is important to stress that what An Bord Pleanála does is much more narrowly focused and defined that what the local authority does, so one could argue that An Bord Pleanála having 19 weeks under the existing regime is too long. While the Minister gave us evidence, I am not convinced the evidence as presented supports the overall objectives of this Chapter. I will not repeat this argument at every section but I would like to know if consideration was given to rethinking the statutory framework for pre-planning, for shortening the time for additional information to be supplied by applicants, once they have applied, and for shortening the timeframe, and if necessary increasing the resources to An Bord Pleanála to tighten its timeframe. If the Minister had taken those steps, he could by my calculations come up with a 25 week turnaround framework, without taking the power away from local authorities to make the primary planning decision.