Call to scrap fees for planning objections
Fees to object to planning applications should be abolished, it was claimed today.
The calls were made to the Government on the eve of a European Court of Justice preliminary ruling concerning fees for environmental impact assessments.
The court is expected to conclude that the fee is in breach of the 1985 Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) directive, according to Labour MEP Proinsias De Rossa.
A fuller, definite ruling, is due from the courts in the autumn.
Irish residents currently pay €20 (and €45 on appeal) when lodging observations or objections to a planning application.
“While tomorrow’s preliminary ruling concerns fees for environmental impact assessments another separate challenge concerns similar fees for lodging objections or observations about potentially dangerous industrial plants, which should also be dropped,” said Mr De Rossa.
“The directive guarantees the public the right to express their opinion when ’environmental impact assessments’ are being carried out on a wide range of projects such as roads, sewage treatment plants, pipelines, quarries, shopping centres, car parks, marinas and other tourist developments etc.
“There is no provision however in the EIA directive permitting these fees and to my knowledge, no other EU Member State does so. The fees breach both the spirit and the letter of European law, as well as the polluter-pays principle.”
Meanwhile the Irish Planning Institute, which represents planners throughout the country, has also expressed concerns that key principles of the state’s planning system could be undermined by the
Planning and Development (Strategic Infrastructure) Bill 2006 which is now before the Oireachtas.
The Institute supports the principle of faster and more effective planning decisions, particularly with regard to key infrastructure where there is a general consensus that the development is needed and will benefit the common good.
But it maintains that the one stop shop mechanism proposed by the Bill would only be acceptable in cases where a project has been identified in a plan that has gone through a public consultation process and where the merits of the project in terms of spatial planning have been considered in principle.
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