Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 28 September 2021
863. Deputy Cormac Devlin asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the number of felling licences issued during each of the years 2016 to 2020, in tabular form; if he will provide an update on efforts to streamline the licensing system; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [46705/21]
View answerThe Deputy will be aware that certain High Court decisions have changed the processing of forestry licence applications, resulting in approx. 80% of applications being screened in for a comprehensive ecological assessment, a situation for which the Department was not prepared.
In addition, the number of appeals increased from 21 in 2017 to a peak of 582 in 2020. This combination of events led to a backlog of licence applications. I am very aware of the obligations my Department has towards applicants, but also to ensure that systems and processes are compliant with legal framework.
In respect of licensing, resources have been significantly increased; ecologists have gone from one in 2018 to 27 currently and 21 additional forestry inspectors have been deployed. The number of licences issued had increased through May and into early July. However, there was a significant fall off in licences issued in July and August, due to a new legal requirement for an additional 30-day public consultation.
Applications in the system, received before 11th January this year when the Forestry Licence Viewer (FLV) was introduced, had to be manually examined and redacted of personal information before the documents were published in the FLV for the second public consultation.
As the introduction of this SI resulted in a reduction in the number of licences issued in June and July, it is unlikely that our target of 4,500 will be met this year and it will be closer to 4,000.
I must note, however that licensing outputs have increased over the past three weeks, with 110 licences issued the week ending 3rd September, 136 the following week and 146 the week ending the 17th.
The Department will shortly announce the successful bidder for the recent tendering process to engage external expertise to carry out an end-to-end regulatory and process review, which has been sought by the Project Woodland working groups.
This is in addition to the systems analyst already in place. In the meantime, my Department is working with forestry companies to improve the quality of information provided with licence applications. This has already yielded results for felling licences. The same exercise has been completed for forest roads and will shortly be carried out on afforestation licence applications. I expect that licensing output will continue apace for the remainder of the year.
The number of tree felling licences issued from 2016 to 2020 is in the following table. It should be noted that the figure for 2016 and 2020 is skewed by a large volume of Coillte thinning licences. I expect the final figure for 2021 to be 30% higher than 2020.
|
2016 |
2017 |
2018 |
2019 |
2020 |
|
|
Felling Licences Issued |
6,731 |
3,003 |
3,603 |
4,180 |
1,717 |
