Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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An Bord Pleanála (the Board) is the national independent statutory body with responsibility for the determination of planning appeals and direct applications for strategic infrastructure and other developments under the Planning and Development Act 2000, as amended, and certain other Acts.

Arrangements have been put in place by all bodies under the aegis of my Department to facilitate the provision of information directly to members of the Oireachtas. This provides a speedy, efficient and cost effective system to address queries directly to the relevant bodies. The contact email address for An Bord Pleanála in this regard is Oireachtasqueries@pleanala.ie.

In order to be of assistance, my Department requested the information from the Board who have provided the following information.

The Board have advised that normal planning appeal case disposals for the year 2023 to 31st August 2023 was 1,204 cases disposed, with 27% of those disposals within the 18 week statutory objective period and the average time taken for these disposed cases being 47 weeks .

An Bord Pleanála have advised that at present the ICT system utilised by the Board cannot generate the further specific information requested by the Deputy. One of the key actions of my Ministerial Action Plan is to recruit a Director of Transformation and Digital Services for the Board. The recruitment competition to fill this post is now underway. This new position has been created to provide senior leadership in the creation and implementation of a Digital Transformation Strategy for An Bord Pleanála. The strategy will include setting out a vision for the future delivery of services, which will require the redesign of business processes to improve efficiencies and efficient decision making.

The Board publishes case statistics on a quarterly basis on the Board website which is available at the following link: www.pleanala.ie/en-ie/statistics/quarterly-statistics. The Board have advised that they are working to address the backlog of all case types on hand with the continued filling of staff vacancies and the imminent appointment of a 15th Board Member to the Board. The Board have addressed the delays to determining cases via a statement on their website which is available at the following link: www.pleanala.ie/en-IE/BacklogInformation.