The Department of Public Expenditure has unveiled a document proposing the reintroduction of an appeals mechanism for planning consents on comprehensive residential projects. This proposition may lead to lesser legal hurdles and contestations to such developments.
The paper points out that under the preceding strategic housing development initiative, where developers presented their plans directly to An Bord Pleanála, legal reviews possibly functioned as a “decoy-appeals process”. The strategic housing development, as per analysis conducted by the Irish Government Economic Evaluation Service (IGEES) staff, aimed to encourage considerable projects via an expedited planning process. Although the programme was discontinued post February 2022.
The document finds the strategic housing development process significantly swift compared to large-sized projects prior to 2017 when no legal objections were raised against the granting of planning consents. Even in cases of legal objections, the strategic housing development process proved to be 10-19 weeks quicker on average compared to the conventional bifurcated local authority mechanism for large projects.
However, the prevalent occurrence of legal reviews among strategic housing development applications put the attainment of shorter planning timelines at risk. The average period between planning judgement and legal review verdict was 38.3 weeks, with variations ranging from 11 weeks at minimum to 104 weeks at maximum.
The paper suggests that given the high count of ongoing legal reviews, it’s challenging to assess definitively whether the strategic housing development process succeeded in truncated planning periods. Decisions on planning consents as per strategic housing development scheme rules, were ultimately at An Bord Pleanála’s discretion; absence of an appeals mechanism left legal review as the sole route to potentially halt a development.
On inspecting strategic housing developments, it was found that 23.4 per cent had been legally reviewed. The vast proportion (95 percent) of the legal reviews happened after the consent of a strategic housing development planning permission. A direct correlation was observed between the count of observations listed regarding a strategic housing development application and the instance of legal review.
This insinuates that there’s a higher possibility of judicial review for applications that garnered considerable public interest via observations, suggesting that the system of judicial review could have functioned to an extent as an alternative appeal process. One might view the reintroduction of the appeal mechanisms for extensive residential planning applications post the completion of the strategic housing development procedure as a beneficial progression. This could diminish the frequency of judicial reviews going forward, coupled with the recent December 2023 release of the new Planning and Development Bill.