Report of the Local Government Efficiency Review Group

the majority of town councils, a planning application is received by the town
council, referred to a county council planner to draft a decision, that draft
decision is referred to the town council, and the decision is issued by the
town council.
5.6.5 There is an obvious potential to streamline this process and remove
duplication. Some counties have a number of planning authorities (one at
county level and several at town level). Each planning authority has to
provide a counter service to receive a planning application and each
authority has its own scanning and digitising arrangements. This duplication
of administrative work is repeated throughout the process, including the
appeal stage. If the planning function was transferred from the town
councils to the county councils, savings in the region of 10%-15% can be
achieved. This release of resources can be utilised to address lacunae in
planning and building enforcement.
5.6.6 In the roads area, grants for road improvements / maintenance are allocated
by the Department of Transport to rating town councils as road authorities
for local urban roads. In contrast, with the exception of the recently
introduced footpath grant, no specific allocations are made for urban areas
that do not have a rating town council, even though in some cases the
populations of such towns may be much greater than those having town
council status. According to Census 2006, there are 34 towns with
populations of 10,000 and over (in the case of town councils this includes
the population in the legal boundary and the census environs). Only 23 of
these have rating town councils, while 6 have non-rating town council
status, and 5 are towns which do not have town council status, such as
Swords, Celbridge, and Carrigaline. A more balanced and equitable
approach would be to allocate to each county council an urban grant for
local urban roads, with the county council determining the urban road spend
across all towns in its administrative area.
5.6.7 In terms of housing, a major reform programme has been underway in
recent years involving a significant shift away from the traditional
construction/ acquisition model and towards a greater role for sourcing and
leasing social housing from the private sector, that has fundamentally
changed the work and responsibilities of housing authorities. This
reorientation of policy means that future work in terms of housing services is
likely to result in a need to concentrate resources on the management and
maintenance of housing stock, on balancing supply and demand for social
housing, and on sourcing suitable accommodation through leasing
arrangements.
5.6.8 There are a number of activities of housing authorities that could be better
undertaken at a county level due to their complexity (e.g. new leasing
arrangements), specialisation or for reasons of economies of scale. These
include:
• Procurement of social housing accommodation and the management
of projects;
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