Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I was fascinated by the answer of the Minister of State. If I apply for planning permission tomorrow, statutory timelines apply and they must deal with everything mentioned by the Minister of State, including SACs, SPAs, the IFI and the National Parks and Wildlife Service. There is a tendency in this country when someone gets a file in an agency to throw it down and leave it if there is no timeline required. It is left until someone goes crazy and insists on getting an answer. Every Deputy knows that our offices are clogged with cases of people coming to us to say they cannot get an answer. There is no reason to believe the decision the Minister of State will make is any more complex, or half as complex, as many planning decisions. We are talking about a simpler operation. If an application is made, it is easy to insert in the Bill that it is presumed the Forest Service or the IFI has no questions if it does not reply within a fortnight. This will mean that agencies are not allowed to drag their feet while we wait for the slowest player.

When I was a Minister, I started a process that insisted on every section returning replies to representations made to the ministerial offices within a fortnight. If the section did not return the answer, the Minister's office would write the answer. When they thought that the Minister's office might write the answer, they came back like a shot. The usual pile of correspondence in a Minister's office disappeared and the sections started doing their jobs before it got as far as someone having to appeal to the Minister to get an answer.

With An Bord Pleanála, there is a statutory objective of four months but we know that for a single house or for a small planning matter it is more observed in the breach. There is no proportionality and no system that means a massive decision will take longer. The small decisions also get into the same queue that leads to never-never land. When we know this happens and write it into legislation, it is "open Sesame" for people to say they are so busy that they cannot get the job done in time. When statutory dates are included, people suddenly find a way of getting the job done on time. When has the Minister of State heard of a planning authority not being able to get a decision made within the statutory time?

Unless the Minister of State is willing to accept statutory time limits, I will oppose the section and I will oppose the amendments one by one. We are getting fluff that is meaningless in law instead of clear timelines that people must adhere to and the delivery of services that people are crying out for.

In my time in politics, I have come across no evidence that the delay is giving us any better decisions. It is not that we are getting more decisions, we are getting more paperwork. I tabled a very simple amendment. Normally, in these processes, when observations are returned, a Member writes to the client one last time to allow the client to respond. The suggestion I make is that the time from when the client was asked the last question to the final decision date should be a maximum of eight weeks.

The planning system has a whole series of timelines, which I prefer. After lodging applications and consulting, the authority must come back within eight weeks if it has questions of the applicant. Once the applicant answers the questions, the authority must make a decision. I cannot understand why the Minister of State did not lift the process from the planning law, which is time-limited. I think the Minister of State knows about it because he was once a councillor. The system operates well because it forces decisions within fixed time limits.

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