This article is from page 17 of the 2006-10-24 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 17 JPG
THE NEW formalised pre-planning service has come in for a hammering with calls for the county council to either set up a dedicated department for it or scrap it altogether.
Conflicting information, changes in restrictions and even reversals of advice given have dogged the process, leaving applicants frustrated, out of pocket and without permission, Councillor Martin Conway (FG) said. Pre-planning is a service which the council offered in an informal way before. But early this year, it became formalised with the service being offered on the council’s web site.
Cllr Conway has now called for a dedicated department to be set up within the local authority to deal with pre-planning.
“A house is the biggest outlay people are ever going to undertake and with the huge expense involved, it can save couples up to a hundred thousand euros if a parent can give them a bit of land. But that’s no good if they can’t get permission to build.”
The Fine Gael councillor said that he had been called on after couples were given advice in the pre-planning meeting only to find “that a very different view may be taken when they go ahead to apply for permission. Most pre-planning meetings are based on looking at site maps but, when planning is in and a planning officer goes out to look at a site, it can be a very different story. What a planner says about a map and what might be said about a physical site can be two very different things. This service needs to be provided properly if it is to be provided at all,” said Cllr Conway.
According to the council’s planning department, the number of preplanning enquiries received up to September 30, 2006 was 696. This compares with 483 for the full year 2005 and shows an increase of 52 per cent for the comparable January to September period.
These enquiries are responded to by way of written replies, telephone calls and meetings with the area planners. To date this year, 164 meetings have been recorded.
A spokesman for the council said that “new procedures were put in place this year to facilitate pre-planning enquiries and meetings. The procedure provides for submission of a site map and clear details so that they can be plotted on map info and linked to any subsequent planning application.”
He added that it was “planned to extend the use of the internal office system to agents, who account for the vast majority of planning applications. This will allow direct access by them to a self service pre-planning system.”