Codes of conduct for councillors and officials "must be observed to the letter" in the preparation of development plans and no one involved in the process should have a vested interest, Minister for the Environment Dick Roche said yesterday.
Launching a set of draft guidelines on how local authorities should prepare development plans, he told the annual conference of the Irish Planning Institute (IPI) in Sligo that elected members and officials must work closely and constructively from the beginning.
However, Mr Roche rejected suggestions that the role of making and adopting development plans should be transferred from councillors to officials to curb abuses of power on land rezoning, as highlighted by the revelations of corruption at the planning tribunal.
"Given the impact development plan policies can have on local areas, it is my firm view that a democratic mandate for development plans from the elected representatives of local communities is essential to support buy-in to the plan from the wider public."
The Minister said councillors who eventually adopted a plan "must be intimately involved in the process from inception to finalisation", to ensure that it is "grounded in a comprehensive overview of the process and a full understanding of all of the issues".
Coming more than 40 years after provision for development plans was first made in the 1963 Planning Act, the guidelines deal with all aspects of the plan-making process, how objectives should be framed and how plans should be presented, monitored and evaluated.
With the State's population set to grow by up to one million over the next 15 years, Mr Roche said development plans should be "a catalyst for positive change and progress". They should also be "responsive to the planning issues arising from growing cultural diversity".
The guidelines, which are open for consultation for 12 weeks, place a particular emphasis on the use of the internet to give the public access to the plan, to assist in handling submissions and to ensure that an updated text and the relevant maps are widely available.
The Minister congratulated local authorities on a "phenomenal output from the planning process" in 2005.
He said it was also critical that planning consultants engage in a real dialogue with their clients about their expectations, even before they approach local authorities, because there were "still too many poorly prepared applications being submitted".
Referring to a call by IPI president Henk van der Kamp on the Government to rewrite the National Spatial Strategy, Mr Roche said it would be "premature" to initiate any formal review because the 20-year strategy was sufficiently robust to cope with population growth.
