A fresh report has been defended amid suggestions it holds vague recommendations on changing judicial reviews and the planning system that overlap with actions the Government has already put in motion.
The Committee on Infrastructure and National Development Plan Delivery published the report Matters Relating to Transport, Energy and Housing Delivery on Thursday.
The committee chairman, Fianna Fáil TD Seán Fleming, said its “concise” report containing 12 recommendations “to improve delivery and mitigate obstacles” to infrastructure development was based on 24 meetings and “expert testimony” from 92 witnesses.
One recommendation said “Government action is needed to reform the Judicial Review processes regarding critical infrastructure projects” and ensuring reviews are “fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive”.
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In recent months, the Government has announced measures aimed at changing the judicial review system.
At the report’s launch, said Fleming, “it should be far more difficult to have judicial review” when it comes to critical infrastructure, highlighting how such reviews are used more in the Republic than elsewhere.
The committee also recommended that “planning and approvals processes need to be simplified and streamlined to speed up the pace of approvals and to eliminate duplication”.
Fleming said there were aspects of planning applications that “need to be co-ordinated and be done [in] tandem rather than in sequential order”.
The last government brought in the 700-page-plus Planning and Development Bill aimed at changing the planning system.
Neither Fleming nor other committee members at the launch – all from Coalition parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – expressed any dissatisfaction with Government efforts to change judicial review and planning processes.
There were no Opposition committee members present, though Fleming said they had signed off on the report and “made very constructive amendments”.
One Opposition committee member, Labour’s Conor Sheehan, later said “important amendments” he proposed on zoned land and multiannual funding were included in the document, that there had been “a lot of debate and on balance I signed off and was keen to see the report published”.
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However, at the launch, it was put to committee members that a recommendation that the planning system needed to be streamlined was “vague”.
In response, Fleming referred to another recommendation in the report on the need for “regulator efficiency and development” and suggested planning authorities would need “more skills and knowledge and resources” as demand on their services grows.
When it was suggested that the recommendation on judicial review did not appear to deviate from what the Government was already doing, Fleming replied: “We are TDs, we’re not the legal experts, so we’re not prescribing precisely the detail of the reforms. We know it needs reform because it’s [judicial review] being overused.”
On whether there was dissatisfaction with the significant planning legislation passed by the last Dáil, Fleming replied “no”, but said there were “systems already in place that need to be more efficient”.
Committee member and Fine Gael TD John Clendennen told the launch that given there was “so many different tiers of focus on infrastructure ... there’s bound to be an element of overlap in relation to recommendations.”
