Significant curbs on the rights of people to make objections to An Bord Pleanβla will be introduced shortly, the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, has decided.
Objectors will not be allowed to lodge appeals with An Bord Pleanβla unless they have first made their opposition known to their local authority within five weeks of a planning application being submitted to the council.
The significant change is a key part of the regulations necessary to operate the Planning and Development Act, 2000, which are currently before the Dβil Committee on the Environment and Local Government.
The five-week local authority deadline for objections will be enforced, regardless of the project's size and regardless of how long it takes local authorities to decide whether to approve or reject it.
"If you send one in after that, it will be sent back to you - unopened," according to the President of the Irish Planning Institute (IPI), Mr John Spain, who called for urgent changes before the regulations are signed into law.
Some politicians believe that the An Bord Pleanβla process is currently being abused. "Often people go to it when they just want to delay matters," said Fianna Fβil Clare TD Mr Tony Killeen.
An appeal usually takes seven months. One source commented: "Sometimes, we find that objections to social housing, for instance, only come up then [at An Bord Pleanala level]. Sometimes, other developers abuse it to delay competitors."
However, the changes heavily weigh the odds against objectors, according to the planning institute.
Opponents of the change will argue that many people often do not find out for weeks about developments in their areas.
Currently, local authorities must give a decision on a planning application within two months, unless additional information is sought. The period within which a decision is made can be as short as four weeks in some cases, according to the planning institute.
Under the new regulations, local councils cannot decide in less than five weeks. But they will have to do so within eight weeks unless they give developers more time to submit additional information.
The decision to cut the objectors' time is necessary to speed up development and cut the workload on local authority planners, the Department of the Environment believes.
However, IPI representative Mr Philip Jones said the changes were coming at a time when extra planners were being hired and the economy was slowing down.
"We are already seeing the downturn beginning. The new planners are arriving. An equilibrium will be reached fairly quickly," he has told the Oireachtas committee.
An application will be deemed to have been withdrawn after six months if a developer does not heed a local authority's request for further information.
The IPI has warned that the regulations, as drafted, could let developers apply for an extension to their planning permission even if they did not carry out the majority of the work, as required under the law.
