I thank the members of the committee for giving us the opportunity to express our views on planning. In Galway the rural dimension is extremely important. Unlike the rest of the country, approximately 70% of the houses for which we grant permission are in rural areas, which is a reversal of the national average. As Deputy Grealish said, the issue that exercises us most of the time is how best to achieve the correct balance. Galway is an unusual county in having very weak areas and very strong areas. It has some very scenic areas and some areas where scenery would not be so important. Our policy is largely based on a settlement strategy whereby we try to ensure that development takes place in a balanced manner and is spread throughout the county.
I will give some figures to support the strategy in place and to show that it is working. In the three years prior to the adoption of our current development plan, inside what we call the GTPS, which is a planning boundary, we granted permission for 6,125 rural houses, and outside we granted permission for 2,481. After the implementation of the county development plan which includes restrictions on houses within the GTPS, the number of houses granted permission dropped. These are houses that result from urban-generated demand from the city. The number reduced to 4,183. However, outside the GTPS in the weaker part of the county the number increased to 3,131, an increase of nearly 700 houses in a three-year period. This must be significant for the rural economy and the rural communities that have benefited from that growth.
Having said that, I accept that there is always room for improvement. We are now working very closely with the members on the variations to the development plan. The central issue will be the issue of rural housing policy, whether the policy we have in place is meeting the desires of the members and what changes need to take place. We have also moved the debate on substantially from just rural housing as being the key issue for the rural economy. We are also considering rural enterprise centres. We are very conscious of the need to ensure a smooth transition from the existing rural economy to a post-Fischler type of enterprise economy. We are debating the matter at local electoral area meetings. The big issue for us is to ensure that good intentions do not get misinterpreted and in trying to create rural enterprise we do not find that we rob towns and villages of the enterprises they already have. We are trying to get a policy that will let rural enterprise grow organically from the rural communities rather than it transferring out from towns and villages. We have done considerable work on the matter and I am quite hopeful that at the end of the process we will have a policy with which we can experiment for two or three years, which has become standard practice for us. After that period we can review it and if necessary change it.
The issue of consistency is not unique to planning authorities in Ireland, but applies to all planning authorities. As Mr. Kehoe said, we try to address it by keeping the applicant more informed. We have a process which involves giving a pre-planning report to every applicant who sends us details of the site of the proposed house. The pre-planning report, sent within one week of the request, outlines the planning constraints on that site. We also supply the applicant with an extensive 17-page report. It is extensive because it reflects how complex planning is. The report explains the significance of each of the planning restrictions. I accept, as Mr. Kearns has said, that giving this report to planning applicants may not fully meet their needs, as it is difficult to interpret. However, at least they have the information which allows them to ask their agent whether particular considerations have been taken into account.
Some of the provisions are so simple that people might ask why we put them in. However, they are issues that are not being addressed by agents when they make applications to us and which we require to be addressed. Such issues can result in the generation of requests for further information at the last minute, which causes so much irritation to the applicant. There is a chain of communication. The planning authority communicates primarily with the agent. Not all, but some agents will then communicate to the applicant what suits the agent best. The applicant might then give a local authority member his or her interpretation of what has happened. In some cases local authority members know that what they have been told is not the truth. However, in other cases they come back and ask us what has happened. Some effort is being made by all planning authorities to short-circuit that route and deal directly with the applicants to bring them into the frame and ensure they are fully informed.
Pre-planning is an essential part of that process. However, the difficulty is that many applicants and agents are not fully prepared. Our insistence that applicants go through the pre-planning process and get a document stating that they must take 23 considerations into account prepares them better. We would like to move on and reach a stage whereby we could inform people that based on the information they have supplied they qualify for a rural house, so they can proceed to purchase a site from a farmer that would enable them to build such a house. I am not sure whether resources will permit that to take place within the next 12 months but that is where we want to be and where we are aiming to go. If we do that, we will stand some chance of controlling the price of housing sites.
If planning restrictions are not sufficiently rigorous, all the land in a local area will be almost sterilised when someone in the area sells a site for a big price like €300,000 or €400,000. If land owners know that one of their neighbours up the road got such a price for a site, they will not sell their sites for less. That results in people from the locality getting priced out of the market. The big issue for the County and City Managers Association is to ensure that people can build houses in their localities which comply with the principles of proper planning and sustainability, etc. It is easier to achieve compliance with such principles than to strike a balance by putting in place a system that is rigorous enough to ensure that local people can build houses but people who are in there with money cannot do so. It is something we will have to keep working at.
There are different policies in different counties because there are different pressures in different areas. Different priorities may be established by elected members of different local authorities. I could speak all day about these matters, which is part of my problem, but I will leave it at that.