Summary
General administration
This Office has considered in some detail the various aspects of the complaint made as set out above. The examination has shown that there were a number of errors on the part of the Council in its administration of planning applications P02/590 and P02/591 including the date stamping of documents, the handling of the fees in relation to the applications and, in particular, the information provided to the complainant on 9 April 2002 and 12 April 2002. These errors contributed to his sense of grievance and unfair treatment and to his submission on the April 2002 applications being late. His late submission was refused by the Council and this refusal resulted in his ineligibility to appeal the Council's decision to An Bord Pleanála. In light of these errors, this Office asked the Council to review its handling of the matter and to advise the Ombudsman of the steps it had taken to ensure that the errors which occurred in this case would not recur and, to state what redress it proposed to offer the complainant.
The Council has outlined its current practices regarding the receipting, stamping and validation of applications and the handling of fees for invalid applications. These have been described in some detail earlier.
Redress - Compensation
This Office takes the view that the failures of the Council, as described above, contributed to the failure of the complainant to make a submission to the Council within the required period and, as a consequence, to the loss of his statutory right of appeal to An Bord Pleanála. The Ombudsman takes this type of administrative failure very seriously and, therefore, the Council was asked to consider what redress it would propose to offer the complainant.
In response the Council advised that the planning applications which were the subject of complaint to the Ombudsman were not subsequently acted upon. It advised that P02/590 was in fact withdrawn. It has also advised that P02/591 was superseded by P03/937, on which application the complainant was entitled to make whatever submissions/observations he wished. While these points have been taken into account, the fact remains that the complainant had some justification for making the case that, arising from failures on the part of the Council, he was late with his submission on application P02/591 in 2002 and, as a result, he lost his right of appeal to An Bord Pleanála. He was not to know that application P02/591 would be superseded at a later date and one cannot predict what the outcome of an appeal to An Bord Pleanála might have been or what the outcome of the Board's decision on that appeal might have had on the eventual development. In recognition of its failures, the Council offered compensation in the amount of €2,000.
Having considered the matter carefully, and taking into account, in mitigation, the fact that neither application received in the Council on 4 April 2002 was acted upon by the developer, this Office is of the view that compensation of the order of €2,500 would be appropriate in the circumstances. This is the sum considered reasonable to compensate the complainant for the errors which contributed to the loss of his statutory right to appeal the Council's decision to An Bord Pleanála, and for time, trouble and general costs incurred in making his complaint.
In its response, the Council stated that it noted the contents of the examination report of the Ombudsman and accepts the redress figure proposed of €2,500. Therefore, the Office considers the matter to be at an end.