State planning agency lost 90% of legal objections to large housing projects
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The State agency with responsibility for planning decisions has lost almost 90% of the legal objections lodged to its decisions regarding strategic housing developments (SHDs).
An Bord Pleanála has been subject to 33 completed judicial reviews on SHDs – applications for 100 or more homes that bypass local authorities and cannot be appealed within the planning system – since the controversial provision was launched in 2017.
The independent body has lost 29 of those cases, according to new figures. Some 14 cases were conceded without a hearing, with the remaining 15 concluding following a full court hearing and judgment, it said.
Of the four cases taken in which the challenge to An Bord Pleanála decisions was rejected, two of them related to the same planning application.
Judicial review is a branch of the law relating to the legal appropriateness or otherwise of decisions made by State bodies and agencies.
Last month, it emerged that An Bord Pleanála's legal fees on foot of court challenges regarding SHD decisions had more than doubled in 2020 to €8.2m, up from €3.5m in 2019.
That 2020 figure amounted to just under half of the €18.6m An Bord Pleanála had received in State funding in 2019.
More than 40 of the 280 strategic housing applications made to An Bord Pleanála since 2017 have since been the subject of judicial review proceedings. In that time, the planning body has approved 80% of such applications which it has received.
Last month, the board's chair Dave Walsh said that while the number of applications the body had dealt with in 2020 had fallen due to Covid-19, the number of legal cases had increased from 55 in 2019 to 83 last year, a jump of 51%.
The strategic housing development process was introduced in July 2017 to fast-track large-scale housing builds by skipping the local authority planning stage so a decision could be arrived at inside 16 weeks.
Previously, objections to a local authority would typically have delayed a development by a minimum of six months regardless of the objection’s robustness, as seen in the case of a stalled application to build a data centre in Co Galway by tech giant Apple in 2016.
However, the fast-track process, which is due to expire early next year and is not expected to be renewed, has often itself become a target for criticism, not least due to accusations of "planning hoarding" on the part of developers.
In a letter in early June to the Public Accounts Committee on foot of An Bord Pleanála’s May appearance before the same committee, Mr Walsh said of the four SHD cases to date in which the agency prevailed, it nevertheless failed to be awarded its legal costs in all four cases.
He said that typically where a judicial review objection is lodged to a Bord Pleanála decision, the associated legal submissions will include between 25 and 75 grounds for challenging the legality of the initial decision.
The most common reason for the quashing of board decisions is a legal issue concerning the “material contravention of the development plans”, he said, which had been the main deciding issue in nine cases to date. Such contraventions typically relate to a development’s height exceeding default limits.