Reintroduction of planning permission appeals may reduce legal challenges to large developments

The reintroduction of a mechanism to appeal planning permission granted for large-scale residential developments may reduce legal challenges and obstacles to such schemes, a new paper released by the Department of Public Expenditure has suggested.

The report maintains that under the previous strategic housing development initiative – where developers brought their plans directly to An Bord Pleanála – judicial reviews could have been “acting as a pseudo-appeals mechanism”.

The report, drawn up by staff of the Irish Government Economic Evaluation Service (IGEES), says that the strategic housing development aimed at providing a fast-track planning process to incentivise large-scale projects.

The scheme was not extended by the Government beyond February 2022.

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The paper concludes that the strategic housing development process was “significantly faster compared to the processing time for large-scale developments before 2017 in cases where judicial reviews were not sought by those challenging the granting of planning permission.

“Where judicial reviews have occurred, the strategic housing development process has still been on average 10- 19 weeks faster than the traditional two-tiered local authority process for large scale developments.”

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“However, the high prevalence of judicial reviews among strategic housing development applications presents a risk to the achievement of shorter planning time frames. The average time between planning decision and judicial review outcome was here found to be 38.3 weeks with significant variation around this average ranging from a minimum of 11 weeks to a maximum of 104 weeks.”

It says that given the large number of judicial reviews that have yet to conclude, “it is difficult to definitively access whether the strategic housing development process was successful in achieving reduced planning time frames”.

The report says under the rules of the strategic housing development scheme, decisions on planning permission were ultimately at the discretion of An Bord Pleanála. It said the lack of an appeals mechanism left judicial review as the only means by which interested parties could potentially halt a development.

It says that 23.4 per cent of strategic housing developments had been subject to judicial review.

“The vast majority (95 per cent) of judicial reviews occurred following the granting of a strategic housing development planning permission, with the analysis finding a positive relationship between the number of observations submitted regarding a strategic housing development application and the occurrence of judicial review.”

“This suggests that applications that received more public attention in the form of observations were more likely to be subject to judicial review, indicating that the judicial review process could have been acting in part as a pseudo-appeal mechanism.”

“In this sense, re- introducing the appeals mechanisms for large scale residential development planning applications following the expiration of the strategic housing development process can be considered a positive development which may reduce the prevalence of judicial reviews into the future, alongside the new Planning and Development Bill published in December 2023.”

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