Before we adjourned, I was urging on the Minister the importance of having inspector reports published. This would make available a large volume of planning reports which would be of considerable interest, even important. It would mean that with each planning appeal decision we would have the reasons for the decision. Therefore, we would be able to compare the reasons given for the decision on the appeal with the inspector's report and make up our own minds about it. We are hopefully moving into a whole new era in planning in which instead of the famine of information we have had up to now, we will have a vast amount of information about planning decisions. Such a vast amount of information cannot but be helpful to people who are interested and concerned about preserving and legitimately developing our physical environment.
I would now like to move on to a third point of ambiguity in the Bill about which I am not altogether happy. "Ambiguity" is perhaps not the right word. What I would like to do is to pose a question to the Minister as to whether he has really worked out in detail the implications of one particular aspect of the Bill. That is the one which empowers local authorities to acquire and carry out work on open space which has been left unfinished by developers. I am very conscious of the fact that this particular power is something which many residents' associations and local associations ask the Minister to give to local authorities.
It seems to me to have implications which might not be altogether desirable. For example, it seems to imply that local authorities in this situation will virtually have to set up their own parks Departments. They will have to expand employment in order to service these areas and of course will have to recoup the expenditure from the local ratepayers in respect of this. This could become a very costly exercise for local authorities.
I wonder why this particular change has been made at this time other than in terms of the requests from local resident associations and so on. As I understand the situation, the usual mechanism adopted to ensure that development was carried out in an appropriate manner is the posting of a bond by the developer — an insurance bond which more or less guarantees that he will carry out the final work, the landscape of the open space and so on, in accordance with his planning permission. The Minister should tell the House whether this system has been weighed in the balance and found wanting and if this new provision is now intended to take the place of the bond system. To my mind the bond system, in that it was the financial and administrative responsibility of the developer, is a better system if it can be made to work. We should be slow to pass legislation which would more or less encourage developers to skimp on their responsibilities in the knowledge that the anger of the local residents will be turned not on them, as it should be, but on the local authorities.
There are a couple of matters I would like to refer to which I am sorry not to see included in the Bill. There are many aspects of this Bill which represent a tidying up of the 1963 Act and an addition of various matters which were not covered in the 1963 Act. I think it a pity that there are not more of them. There are a couple of specific ones I would like to bring directly to the Minister's attention. The first and perhaps the most important one is that there is still no provision in the Bill or in our planning legislation generally for having special inquiries for major planning applications. I am thinking especially of major planning applications which are made to relatively small understaffed local and planning authorities.
This is a matter which is, if anything, going to increase in the very near future with the development of our offshore resources, whether oil or gas. These are quite likely to take place off the territory of relatively small local authorities and may indeed in some cases affect more than one local authority. At the moment there is no provision for a special inquiry at the point of initial application for a major scheme like this. I am thinking of a scheme such as the gas one in Cork or if oil is found in the Irish Sea or in the Atlantic on the Continental Shelf—a scheme which will be of national importance. It is absurd to expect a very small local authority with little or no planning expertise available to it to sit in judgment on what is fundamentally a planning application of national rather than local importance.
As things stand at the moment most local authorities face this kind of situation. They will almost always refuse development permission on the grounds that it will then go to appeal and the ball will be out of their court and into the court of somebody more qualified to deal with it. This is to my mind putting an unnecessary step into the process. It should be possible to handle national applications other than by way of continual appeal— applications for schemes of national importance.
I should like to see the Minister writing into the Bill a provision that the board themselves, perhaps on request by a local authority, may institute a special inquiry for major applications. This sort of special inquiry would be held on terms and conditions decided by the board. This would be a form of assistance to the local authorities concerned, especially smaller and poorer ones, and would produce a much better standard of discussion at the level of the initial application.
The second problem—and this is one which has been referred to by other Members of this House—is the delay in deciding appeals. The Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland in their initial submissions on this Bill, of which I have been given a copy, call very strongly for a time limit on decision. There is a very strong case to be made for this. Every architect who individually contacted me about the Bill also made the case for a time limit on appeals.
I would be grateful if the Minister would let us know what the average delay on appeal is at the moment. One figure I have been given by a practising architect suggests that there is an average of 32 months between submission of appeal to the Minister and the decision by the Minister on this appeal. We are obviously moving into a different situation with the establishment of the planning board. We must not ever allow this sort of situation to happen again. I would urge very strongly on the Minister to consider either a directive to the board or to write into the Bill that planning appeals should be deemed to have succeeded unless a contrary decision is given within a stated time. The board already have power in the Bill to take applications out of sequence if they considered this necessary for any reason. This underlines the possible value of having a time limit on appeal. It can be done by ministerial directive. It might be better to do it that way than to write it into the Bill. One way or the other, I believe it should be done.
A third area which I am sorry the Bill has not touched in more detail is that, in spite of its initiative with regard to the preservation of house interiors, it still contains no provision for conservation areas as such. It is possible for local authorities to identify individual buildings which they would like to see preserved; but it is not yet possible here, as it is in Northern Ireland, for a local authority to specify a whole area as being worthy of special consideration in terms of planning and development. Such an area might be a townscape like Upper Leeson Street; it might be a Gaeltacht village; it could be in any part of the country.
It is important that we have some kind of provision to allow local authorities to establish conservation areas like this. I am not suggesting that these areas should be preserved in aspect for all times, because it is obvious that some development has to take place at some time in almost all of these areas. But the areas should be regarded as of such importance from the point of view of environment generally that no development should take place without special scrutiny and, in particular, that demolition within these areas should not be exempt.
We are all familiar with what happens in towns and in the country with regard to demolition. The demolishers move in and it is a matter of knock down the house and ask questions afterwards. This is a form of blackmail because once the house is gone the planning authority is committed more or less to accepting something in its place, irrespective of how much out of character that new something may be. This form of blackmail could be defeated by, first of all, giving local authorities the power to create conservation areas and, secondly, by insisting that demolition in these areas would not be exempt. Thus a developer who wished to develop in a conservation area would have to approach the local planning authority and say: "I want to knock down No. 16 or No. 25 to 28, and this is what I want to put in its place." The planning decision on the application can then be taken in terms of the whole context of the situation and not in terms of a gaping hole which somehow has to be filled.
It is important also that opportunity should be taken in the Bill to simplify the special amenities order procedure. This was introduced in the 1963 Act. It has not been widely availed of or indeed availed of at all, so far as I am aware, up to now. If this power has not been availed of by local authorities something is wrong. Perhaps it is the wrong power. I suspect that the procedures suggested for it are too complex and perhaps require unnecessary ministerial approval.
Related to the question of conservation areas is the unfortunate fact that there is no provision made whereby scheduled buildings and interiors can be supported financially by local authorities. It is not good enough for local authorities just to schedule a building or an interior and say that they should be preserved. It is possible for the owner, if he happens to be an unprincipled developer, to let the building collapse. Statutory powers should be given to local authorities to contribute, if necessary, in a modest way and perhaps, with the approval of the Minister, to the maintenance of scheduled buildings.
Another matter that has been brought to my attention by members of the architectural profession is the continuing dismay at the way in which section 4 decisions are still being made by some local authorities. This causes alarm and despondency and in a sense undercuts the whole idea of planning and the purpose of the Planning Act. It certainly undercuts anything like a national or regional policy. It appears that this loophole has not yet been stopped up in the Bill and I urge the Minister to give it serious attention.
The lack of planning expertise, which I spoke of earlier, has two main effects in our planning situation generally. The first is that there is a dearth of planners. Few people working in local authorities have planning qualifications and these are concentrated on the eastern seaboard. They are very often not to be found in areas in which the greatest damage is being done to the environment. This is directly related to the fact that there is no proper career structure for those with planning qualifications. Highly qualified people who enter employment with planning authorities as planners often find that their avenue to the top, their career structure, is blocked at a relatively low level. If they want promotion they must move into another area, such as engineering. There are people with excellent planning qualifications who are occupied now solely in engineering or sanitary services. These are estimable services but they are services that are not directly related to the qualifications and particular abilities of these people. There is a real need to open up a career structure for planners, right up to the level of county planning officer. The Minister, through his Department and his relationship with the local authorities, should encourage this. If we do not do this, we will be left with the situation that planning is a low level activity within each planning authority and in which real responsibility never really attaches to the people with planning qualifications.
Section 15 of the original Act allows a local authority to pay for the education of planners. It is a good section and one which has been availed of in the past. Unfortunately it is possible for a young planning student, who has got support from his local authority—say in the west of Ireland —to follow a course in Dublin, to take a position when he qualifies with an eastern seaboard local authority. The section should be amended or directives should be issued in some fashion to ensure that people whose education in planning is supported by their own local authorities will return for a certain period to that area and give it the benefit of their planning expertise. This is a modest proposal. It would not cost any money. It would be a simple administrative arrangement to carry out and I strongly recommend it to the Minister.
One of the biggest gaps in the Bill is the areas of exemptions, which are still very large. Agricultural development is still exempt from planning permission. In the old days agricultural development meant perhaps putting up an outhouse or a shed or a haybarn. There was a good reason for exempting it from planning permission. There are about 40,000 planning applications every year and obviously if all farming developments were to be included it would make the burden of planning authorities even more impossible than it is at present. But we have reached the situation where some identifiable farm developments are so large and have such an overwhelming effect on the environment that we are cutting our own throats if we allow them to continue without planning permission.
There are controls on major agricultural development relating to pollution and so on, but I question if these controls are enough. The best control is by the Planning Act and some of these major developments should be brought in under its scope. If a factory is set up to deal with 3,000 pigs it will produce roughly the same amount of effluent as a town with 12,000 people and it can be done without planning permission. For the sake of the environment and the community generally, this must not be allowed to continue.
This leads me to a fundamental point which the Minister, as one who comes from a largely agricultural constituency, would, I hope, appreciate. There is not enough connection made in the Bill or in planning policy generally between agriculture and planning. Planning policies for the rural areas, and especially the areas reasonably close to towns, take little or no account of the special character of agriculture. Planning decisions given on a completely piecemeal basis have the effect of creating urban fields, little pockets of bricks and mortar right in the middle of agricultural land for individual dwelling houses, which not only affect the general aspect of the environment but may have in the long term a very deleterious effect on our agricultural production. It is very tempting for a farmer who is temporarily short of cash — if there are any such nowadays — to realise a bit of capital by selling off a field, or half a field, for a house and making a couple of thousand pounds on the transaction. This is killing the goose that lays the golden egg. There is no way in which the return to that farmer from selling the land will ultimately make up for the loss to him in cash terms of the agricultural produce which it could support over an extended period.
Another important aspect of the relationship between planning and agriculture in rural areas is that planning policy in general seems to be careless and heedless of the need to establish sensible settlement patterns. There is a strong tendency nowadays for people to move five or six miles out of town to the peace and solitude of the country and build their little house in a corner of some kind farmer's field. We ignore the fact—if we continue to allow this to happen — that by allowing and, in some cases, encouraging spot development like this we are encouraging a settlement pattern which will have an enormous effect on our energy consumption in the future. For a family living in that kind of house having two cars is not a luxury. It would be an absolute necessity. At a time when we are trying to reduce our overall consumption of energy, it seems we are adopting, without too much thought, patterns of settlement which are almost designed to increase it. I would ask the Minister in his exercise of his general political function with regard to planning to bear these matters in mind.
I welcome the point raised by the Minister and incorporated in the Bill relating to the declaration of interest. I welcome this proposal and I should like to think I am partly responsible for it. I wish to point out that requiring individuals involved in planning decisions to disclose their interest is really only tackling one-third of the problem. The web and the nexus of influence and of vulnerability in connection with matters of this kind involve not just individuals. The political associations of which they may or may not be members are involved. Also involved are the people who may seek to influence their decision.
Something along the lines of what the Minister is suggesting for members of local authorities has already been incorporated in the law of the United Kingdom and has helped to spotlight a situation in which very many public representatives have outside interests and are required to declare these outside interests in order that their actions may be seen to be completely above board. I should like to see us going even further in this direction than the Minister has gone. I should like to see us going in the direction that would require similar disclosures of interest by political parties. Several countries, including Belgium and Italy, already have legislation which requires political parties to publish their annual balance sheets in order to qualify for the very substantial State subvention they at present get to help them carry out their business. Political parties in this country do get a substantial subvention from the State and I see no reason why they should not be asked to disclose reasonably detailed balance sheets as a precondition for receiving a State subsidy.
The third area in which I should like to see more progress is to require people who actually make contributions to individual politicians or to political parties to identify themselves, or at least to require the recipients of these gifts to identify themselves. Many countries have adopted legislation along these lines. We are very much in arrear in legislation in this field. In the United States, for example, every political party and political individual has to publish the identity of any person who gives him more than £30 by way of a political contribution in any one year. While we have here the beginning of an attempt to require disclosure of interest related to individual public representatives, which is welcome, I should like to see it extended into the area of political parties and the sources from which the political contributions come.
There are particular problems for local government because local government public representatives are unpaid. Therefore, they are especially vulnerable to the sort of pressure that can be brought to bear on them. I am not suggesting that public representatives who are paid are completely invulnerable to the same sort of pressures. That is obviously not true. There is a special pressure on the unpaid public representative.
