Planners Express Concern About Councillors’ Role In Planning
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Local councillors too often champion the interests of individual landowners and developers over the common good resulting in poor planning for their areas, Mr Andrew Hind, President, Irish Planning Institute (IPI), stated today (Thurs).
Speaking to the PLAN conference in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, he said new measures being drafted by the Minister for Environment, Local Government and Heritage, Mr John Gormley, may not go far enough in curbing such activity by councillors.
However, Mr Hind insisted that the Irish Planning Institute – which represents professional planners - did not want councillors excluded from the planning process as this would be anti-democratic.
He pointed out that while advances in Government policy had been directed towards preventing the recurrence of past bad planning decisions, one critical area where there seemed to be a reluctance to seek improvement was policy decisions taken by the elected members of a local authority against the advice of planners and managers.
“You might think that the investigations into the motivation behind planning decisions that have been taking place at Dublin Castle would have at least softened the appetite amongst some County Councillors to force through into development and local area plans controversial proposals against expert advice. Not so say many of the members of the Irish Planning Institute.”
Mr Hind said that the Constitution and planning legislation suggested that elected members of local authorities should act as the guardians (or even the champions) of the “common good”.
He stated: “The reality, all too often, is almost the opposite with elected members seemingly prepared to champion the interests of individual landowners or developers before all other considerations and very often the result is a poor decision in a development or local area plan that runs contrary to a wider strategy and results in inappropriate development of the types that we are sadly all too familiar with.”
Over the last year there had been repeated calls in the media to reform our planning system and seriously curtail or even exclude the role of councillors altogether. The Minister, Mr Gormley, had indicated that he will include some additional provisions in the new Planning Bill that will limit some of the powers currently available to elected members with regard to development and local area plans.
But Mr Hind said that while the Minister’s proposals may well be desirable, “the indications are that they will fall well short of the kind of package of measure that might be needed to curb the worst excesses that our system currently produces.”
He stated: “Revising our legislation to exclude elected members from the planning system altogether so that all decisions both on policy or zoning and on planning applications were taken by the executive would be deeply anti-democratic and while it might well eliminate some or even all of the ‘horror-story’ zoning decisions, in my view such a step would do little or nothing to restore or rebuild public confidence in the planning system.”
One option would be to make provision for An Bord Pleanála to review development and local area plans before they were finally adopted by local authorities. But there was concern that creating such a role for the Bord would lead to significant delays in the time scale for our statutory plans.
“My own view is that the problems associated with the elected members’ role in the planning system is no different to many other problems in that we can only start to resolve it once we all recognise that there is a problem to be solved and I think it naturally falls on our national political leaders to take the initiative here.
“We seem to lack any clear consensus about we expect from our locally elected politicians. What is their role in representing the broad views of the communities they represent? Should they give priority to constituents? Is it appropriate for our locally elected representatives to act as advocates on behalf of so-called ‘clients’ on wider issues,” asked Mr Hind.
Mr Hind said it would be beneficial if the Minister issued formal guidance on the role of elected members in the planning process. Such guidance would doubtless assist all the stakeholders in the planning system (the public generally, national and local government officials, landowners or others engaged with the planning system as well the elected members themselves) in understanding their roles and could facilitate more effective and appropriate interaction between the key groups.
The IPI President suggested that such Ministerial guidance could result in a more consistent approach in all areas of the country including:
• Guidance on the general role of elected members in relation to the interests of their constituents
• “Best-practice” advice on the structure and conduct of Council meetings during the preparation development and local area plans, particularly so that proposals for inclusion in emerging plans were introduced sufficiently early in the process to allow their full exposure to public debate, proper consideration by council planners and other officials and to allow a full and considered debate in the public meetings of the authority.
• Advice on model arrangements to allow elected members view to be taken into account in the determination of planning applications.
Ends