I was speaking about the Minister's proposals to introduce charges. I accept we will have an opportunity to discuss his Bill in the near future, as the Minister has told us he will bring it before the House shortly. However, I cannot let the occasion pass without making some reference to some of the proposals. In my view very radical changes are proposed in the method of financing local authorities.
The Minister is proposing a new form of local taxation. Under the old Acts there were provisions whereby charges could be made in some cases, which never amounted to great sums of money, but this will be changed and will be superseded by the Bill which the Minister proposes to introduce. There is one disturbing aspect about this. Following the abolition of domestic rates in the 1978 Act, an obligation rested on the Minister for the Environment to recoup in full domestic rate reliefs to each local authority. In the Bill circulated by the Minister he is reneging on that obligation. In my view he is seeking to replace it with an open-ended facility to transfer most of the funding of local authorities to new forms of charges which will be applied locally for services provided by local authorities. This is a fundamental, radical change and because of the open-ended fashion in which it was introduced leaves it open in the future for the Department to divest themselves of their present obligations to fund local authorities as provided for under existing legislation. I will not say much more about this matter at this stage as I will have another opportunity to discuss it.
I should like the Minister to give some indication of the administrative arrangements he has made to enable local authorities to collect the proposed £65 million in extra charges. Information has not been forthcoming from his Department regarding the cost of collecting the money or the new arrangements to be made. The Minister did not refer to the anomalous situation with regard to rate collectors. Formerly they were charged with the collection of all rates but because of legislation passed here they were relieved of their obligation to collect domestic rates. Now agricultural rates have been abolished totally and, therefore, much of the work the rate collectors were employed to do is no longer required to be done. Their duties and responsibilities are greatly diminished, but I am not aware that the level of remuneration has diminished in line with their reduced responsibilities. The Minister could have given us some indication of his proposals in relation to rate collectors and the cost of paying those people who hold appointments. Many people would support the notion that rate collectors should be involved in the collection of the new charges if and when this House agrees to legislation to enable the charges to be imposed. We did not hear anything from the Minister about this matter. I accept that he could not cover all the activities of his Department in an Estimates' speech. The workings of the Department cover a very wide area but I should like the Minister in his reply to give us some indication of his proposals in this matter.
With regard to local authority expenditure in general, I wish to ask what control local authority members exercise over expenditure in their areas. When councillors sit down at estimates meetings the situation is pre-empted because they are faced with the inevitability of accepting proposals put forward by the manager. Of course, long debates take place upstairs between the engineering side and the administrative side in the county council before the figures are settled. As I see the situation, the elected members play an increasingly less active part in the decision-making as to the items of expenditure to be agreed for the financial year. Managers and officials seem to play off elected members in one electoral area against members in other electoral areas. I will explain what I mean. The present expenditure proposals for each electoral area are presented in global form to the members, absorbing all available funds and councillors are obliged in the main to accept the proposals as presented. Otherwise a councillor could be identified as having opposed a specific project in his own electoral area and would find it difficult afterwards to justify his decision on the ground of greater need existing elsewhere.
I spoke earlier of the need to introduce procedures for programme planning and programme budgeting to enable five-year planning to be introduced in local authorities so that future expenditure patterns could be established and adhered to over a period rather than the disastrous ad hoc system which is operating and which is having a very bad effect. Councillors can promote urgent and necessary projects in their own area for years. They may raise the matter at council meetings, they may contact officials about them and generally they may put on considerable pressure to have certain proposals implemented. They may do this for years without success because of the way the system operates and because of the advantage which I considered officials are talking of the elected members.
There was some understanding of this problem when the White Paper on Local Finance and Taxation was published in December 1972. It set out recommendations to make financial control by the elected representatives more effective by bringing about a closer relationship between the independent resources of local authorities and the demand on those resources. That has not been implemented and the frustration still remains.
The time has come to have an independent assessment made of the cost effectiveness of local authorities. I suggest that a start be made by selecting six local authorities on a random basis to see if the services they provide require their present level of funding or whether their staffing levels are really necessary. It is my firm belief that competent, independent assessors would produce startling results. Elimination of wasteful expenditure, more responsible supervision and a return to more realistic staffing levels could reduce local authority bills by millions of pounds. However, because of the nature of things and the many vested interests in this system who will oppose such an assessment, it is unlikely that the Minister will take any action along the lines I suggest.
I believe it is part of the malaise of Ireland today. Striving for excellence seems to be a thing of the past. Are we not already paying a high price for the general lowering of standards so evident in many walks of life today? I take this opportunity, however, to urge the Minister to be his own man, to ignore the vested interests, to set in train an effective method of identifying waste and to take appropriate measures to eliminate recurring waste in the Department and in local authorities. He would do well to start an investigation in the house maintenance sections of our major urban authorities. Every pound saved is a major step on the road to economic recovery.
The Minister referred to the private sector in his address and was critical of the lack of investment by the private sector in the construction industry. The private sector cannot survive unless it makes a profit. That is always there as a restraint on the activities of the private sector. There is no such slat tomhais applied in the manner in which public bodies carry out their functions. I believe it is time, in view of the critical state of the nation's finances, to take a long hard look at the manner in which much of the ratepayers' and taxpayers' money is spent. I believe a lot of the waste could be eliminated, waste which is well covered up, very hard to root out, which no councillor at an estimates meeting of a local authority will be clearly able to identify and prove because of the lack of information provided to him. Waste is never referred to; it is covered up.
Overstaffing is a serious problem. As was mentioned in the debate this morning on the Transport Estimate, local authorities have been obsessed in recent years in merely maintaining their employment numbers. If local authorities are merely to provide employment per se, without any cost effectiveness being applied, let that be the Government's policy and let them stand up and say it. Let the people judge whether that is the way they want their taxes spent. I do not believe it is. I believe there is a great need now to guarantee those who are paying the tax that the public service is giving value for money. In the Minister's area of responsibility where, as he outlined himself, he controls the expenditure of hundreds of millions of pounds, I am convinced from my experience that there is room for a major overhaul resulting in the saving of millions of pounds for the taxpayer. I doubt if the Minister will tackle that.
With regard to the organisation of local authorities, the Minister said that a lot of thought had gone into this in the past. If some of us had been given the opportunity we would have implemented proposals which were well publicised. Successive Ministers, however, over the last few years have not really taken any action regarding the re-organisation of local authorities. The White Paper in 1971 made certain proposals, but very few of them have been implemented since then and no serious review of the necessity to re-organise local authorities has been carried out since then.
What are the Minister's views in regard to the organisation of local authorities? Surely he must agree that the existing structures need to be examined. Many of them were established in the last century at a time when the population of some local authority areas was only a fraction of what it is today and the expansion of housing, commercial and industrial development since has been ten and 100 fold. If one examines the basic legislation upon which the authorities are established, the areas of responsibility, the number of members on each authority and the areas which they are serving, one can see that the whole framework is in need of immediate overhaul and a more meaningful structure established to meet modern needs and the needs of expanded areas.
The functions of local authorities need to be reviewed. New areas could be identified, but in many cases the opposite is the trend. I see the Department usurping many of the functions of local authorities. The National Building Agency has become a huge organisation. It has developed into something which it was never intended to be at the outset. It now seems to be performing the functions of various housing authorities throughout the country. It is a whole new empire inside the Department of the Environment and controls the expenditure of millions of pounds by local authorities. It claims it is performing a very useful task. Nobody has ever looked at that system to see if there is any need to continue the National Building Agency or whether it might not be an unnecessary lair of bureaucracy costing more money. We cannot afford to continue waste.
With regard to the administration of roads, it seems to me that a lot of the decision-making has drifted into the Department. Slowly, bit by bit, with little bits of legislation here and little bits of new regulations there, all the decisions in regard to expenditure on the road network throughout the country are now made inside the Department. The experience of elected members to local authorities in regard to their own areas and the specialised knowledge of local engineers are being disregarded by the Department officials, who are determining how much money there is and where the money shall be spent. This is causing a lot of frustration at local authority level with the officials, engineers and elected members. The Minister and the Department should know that this situation must not be allowed continue without being looked at seriously and the power and the decision-making returned to those who were elected by local people.
We have the great scandal of O'Connell Bridge House and the Custom House administering housing grants, home improvement grants, water grants, group water scheme grants, which functions could be performed adequately at local authority level. In my view and that of a substantial number of people it is absolutely unnecessary that a person seeking a grant from the Government should have to make an application to an office up in Dublin in respect of a house which is being built down the country. To build a new house one must obtain planning permission. It is the local authority who go out to look at the site and who make a decision in regard to the planning. All right, there may or may not be an appeal and that is a different matter, but in the bulk of cases the planning application is granted locally and the services and infrastructure available for that potential house are provided by the local authority.
Nobody has a greater knowledge of the location of the house and the physical structure which is being erected on the site than those who are working locally. It seems absolutely ludicrous that an inspector from the Department of the Environment in Dublin must travel down to the house, look at it and approve it, making two visits in some cases before the grant is paid. That has been the process for a long time. All Governments have operated the system and it is not an answer for the Minister to tell us that this operated when our people were in power. I know there is room for improvement and I do not accept that things which we are criticising now should not have been criticised when my party were in Government. They should, and my criticism here is being made in a legitimate way. This unnecessary waste, this double supervision prior to the payment of a grant in the housing area, must stop.
The Government should recognise the role of the local authority in a democratic State. The people can identify more easily with a local rather than central Government and decisions in regard to priority to be given to major local projects should be with the local authority who themselves are charged with implementing these projects and services. It is of little use to allocate £10 million for improvements in, say, a national primary route or even other road networks in a local authority area if the elected members of that authority have no say in what section of that national primary route the money shall be spent. I understand that all major decisions in regard to road expenditure are being made in the roads section of the Department with no heed to the views of the elected local representatives or council engineers.
Somebody must call a stop or the local authority system will become a farce. Well-intentioned local leaders will withdraw from membership of local authorities. The frustration with the present system gives plenty of evidence of the possibility of dedicated councillors withdrawing from membership of local authorities. People in the Department are public servants and should not have the power to dictate to local authorities as they have been allowed to do in recent years. Local authorities are in a unique position to provide and maintain essential services and infrastructure and to operate State schemes in their sphere of influence. More rather than less power should be allocated to local authorities. The Minister in his speech seems to agree with that principle, but the difference between the word and the deed in this regard has been very blatant over the years. I hope that this Minister will take some positive steps and that we will see some positive results of the intention which he expressed here in relation to devolving the powers.
How can succesive Governments condone the inefficient and expensive system of operating all these grant schemes? The determination of the Department of the Environment to hold on to their grip on the administration of these schemes is not based on practical administrative principles. No. Their determination has more to do with the perpetuation of a mini-civil service empire in the Custom House. This is a scandalous waste of money, and again I call on the Government and the Minister here today to take immediate steps to stop this waste, to reorganise the administration of these schemes and to ensure that, in future, legislation will be enacted and regulations made to ensure that they will be operated through the local housing authorities, the local road authorities and the local sanitary authorities. At present local authorities have these responsibilities in name only and the practical application does not arise. As a small example of the type of double standards which the Department apply under the Planning Acts, a local authority must decide on a planning application within a period of two months from receipt of application but in the case of an appeal — which formerly was made to the Minister and the Department of the Environment and now is made to An Bord Pleanála—no such time limit applies. Why should this major difference exist? Why should the obligation be placed on the local authority to perform within a specified period when no such obligation is placed on the higher, central authority? That attitude of mind runs through many of the Acts and regulations administered by the Department and we cannot afford that luxury any more. We must tighten the belt and ensure that cost effectiveness is examined and applied and that the taxpayer is getting the value of these services which public bodies and local authorities are giving.
I go on to refer to the statement which issued to the papers on 15 March 1983 and I quote from The Irish Times under the heading “Spring says Bord Pleanála under review”:
The Minister's statement reads:
The operations of the Bord Pleanála have been under review, as already announced. This review stems in the first place from the serious deterioration which has taken place in the arrears of work on hands in the board, and the implications of this for employment and for economic activity.
I had a parliamentary question down yesterday — I have already referred to this and I will go into more detail. The Minister has made big play and he has issued several statements regarding his concern about the operations of An Bord Pleanála. He claims that the reason why he is so concerned is the backlog of appeals, the serious deterioration that has taken place in dealing with appeals. Where is the evidence of this? I am as concerned as the Minister and the rest of the country about the delay in deciding planning appeals. It is scandalous that large developments can be unnecessarily held up in this bureaucratic tangle in An Bord Pleanála. There is no point in saying, as the Minister says — whether he is right or not he is so reported in the newspapers — that abolishing An Bord Pleanála and re-establishing it is the solution. I warn the Minister to tread very warily in this area. If there are complaints about the performance of An Bord Pleanála let us deal with the mechanics of those complaints and see where the truth lies, There is a great suspicion of a much wider political implication in the Minister's intention in regard to An Bord Pleanála. I warn him that if that is so he will be setting himself on a road which all of us in this House would decry. Boards are established and members are appointed to them by Government and if the credentials of the membership of thoses boards are to be questioned by new Governments after a change following an election, then the Minister will be bringing us into a new era something along the American style whereby when a change takes place in Government here, all those people who have been appointed by a Government to act on State boards would all be sacked and replaced by people more amenable to the new Government's way of thinking and doing things. If the Minister is seeking to abolish An Bord Pleanála and to replace them with his friends I warn him that he is treading on a very dangerous road. There is no evidence in the figures given to me yesterday——
