An Bord Pleanála 'had to be helped' following year of scandal
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The interim head of An Bord Pleanála has said that the organisation “could not be allowed to go under” after a year of scandal brought the body to its knees.
“It had to be helped,” Oonagh Buckley told the annual conference of the Irish Planning Institute in Clonmel.
Addressing the delegation, Ms Buckley, who was appointed to the board last November following the early retirement of her predecessor Dave Walsh, said that she would not be discussing “the events of the last year since I wasn’t there, and there are ongoing court matters and things like that”.
She discussed the ongoing issue of backlogs at the planning body, saying that the board currently has about “a year’s worth of files on hand”.
The board had told the last month that 62% of cases on hand at the end of January had passed their 18-week timeline for a decision to have been delivered.
Ms Buckley said that 18-week deadline can be met in future for ordinary planning appeals “if we’re properly resourced”.
To that end, she said that the Department of Housing had acceded to her request for additional staffing at An Bord Pleanála, with 297 workers set to be in place by the end of 2023, a figure she had first expressed the need for at the housing committee in February.
She said that 15 board members, a full complement, will be in place by this Monday, April 24, meaning the board will have sourced seven new members in just the past eight weeks.
The vast majority of those members will be on temporary, one-year contracts, with just three members from the board which first encountered the scandals of the past year — Chris McGarry, Patricia Calleary, and Stephen Bohan — remaining.
Ms Buckley said that as An Bord Pleanála transforms into a Planning Commission, per the new draft planning bill before the Oireachtas, its board members will become commissioners with responsibility for planning decisions solely, and not the administration of the organisation, while the role of chair will be split into a chief executive and a chief commissioner.
She said that the current adjustments being put in place at ABP are akin to “building an airplane while trying to fly it”.
The board will shortly hire a director of legal services, she said, after a couple of years which saw An Bord Pleanála's legal fees grow to a consistent level of roughly €8m per annum, just under half its annual budget.
“Amazingly An Bord Pleanála has not had an in-house lawyer up to now,” Ms Buckley said, adding that the prior situation was “astonishing, frankly”.
She said that the board has in recent weeks processed applications for Strategic Housing Developments (SHDs) totalling 6,000 units, with about 75% of them having been granted.
Going forward large scale housing developments are being prioritised from the case backlog, she said, given An Bord Pleanála faces fines for not dealing with such applications in a timely fashion. It has paid €1.06m in such fines to developers for overdue SHD applications in 2021 alone.
The interim chair conceded that in the case of delayed applications which have seen the underlying county development plan since be updated, the board faces a “legal problem” and may “have no choice but to refuse permission in those circumstances”.
Ms Buckley also took aim at solicitors’ firms taking judicial reviews (JR) against An Bord Pleanála decisions, saying that some companies “work out a way of making money from taking JRs and they don’t have to be successful”.
She namechecked Dublin-based solicitors FP Logue and Associates, which has taken 50% of the judicial reviews brought against ABP in the past three years, saying that JRs “are going to make (Mr Logue’s) life very lucrative” over the next 20 years.
Mr Logue has won the vast majority of JR cases he has taken, and will appear at the second day of the planning conference on Friday, a fact Ms Buckley said “intrigued” her.