An Bord Pleanála spends 97% of legal budget on judicial reviews

The legal fees incurred by  An Bord Pleanála have spiralled in recent years to just under €10m in 2022 — more than half of their annual budget. File picture: Niall Carson/PA

Almost the entirety of An Bord Pleanála’s legal spend in 2022 went on judicial reviews (JR), the planning authority has said.

Of the €9.9m spent on legal services last year, just under 97% of it, or €9.6m, was spent on costs associated with such judicial reviews, ABP said.

In a briefing note for the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on foot of its appearance in April, ABP’s interim chair Oonagh Buckley said that some €5m of that spend had resulted from ‘other side’ costs primarily relating to cases lost or conceded by the board.

Judicial reviews are legal cases concerning the correctness in law or otherwise of decisions made by State bodies or agencies.

The use of judicial review to question planning decisions ballooned with the advent of the controversial Strategic Housing Development fast-track planning process in 2017, with many such projects foundering on points of environmental law or for a lack of adherence to the relevant local authority’s development plan.

In her correspondence with the PAC, Ms Buckley noted that 95 JRs had been lodged against ABP in 2022, more than twice the 41 such cases taken in 2018.

The current draft planning bill before the Oireachtas has received a great deal of criticism for proposing that access to judicial review in planning matters be curbed, with the Government repeatedly having speculated that backlogs in the planning process had resulted in part from such legal objections.

Staff shortages

The legal fees incurred by ABP have spiralled in recent years to just under €10m in 2022 — more than half of ABP’s annual budget. Those heightened fees have led to the recruitment of the first in-house legal counsel for the body, a director of legal services, with a hiring process for that role currently under way.

At a planning conference in Tipperary recently, Ms Buckley described the fact that ABP had never before had an internal legal officer as being “astonishing, frankly”.

In her note to the PAC, meanwhile, Ms Buckley responded to queries as to when the Government had first been informed of a staffing crisis at the authority, noting that former chair Dave Walsh had written to the Department of Housing twice in 2021 requesting 13 additional staff across a number of planning roles.

The interim chair has noted repeatedly in recent times that while ABP’s staffing number currently stands at roughly 200, the ideal complement for the authority to be able to deal with the backlog of planning applications it is experiencing would be closer to 300.