Report on planning flawed, says An Taisce

AN TAISCE, the heritage body, has admitted an error in its highly critical report on local planning practices around the State and has withdrawn part of it for correction.

The report – State of the Nation, a Review of Ireland’s Planning System 2000-2011 – identified “the worst councils in Ireland’s planning system” using eight indicators to rank the 34 city and county councils.

The indicators included overzoning, percentage of vacant housing stock and water quality. Low scores indicated poor results: Donegal scored worst in the published rankings with a score of 32, with Mayo at 82 ranking fifth worst.

However, on the table appendix 2, which accompanied the report, and which listed the aggregated eight scores for each county, the figures for one of the indicators, overzoning, were omitted from the total for each council. The final published rankings were in fact based on figures from seven, and not eight, indicators.

When all eight sets of figures are calculated, several councils rank differently. Mayo, with 114 points, moves from fifth worst to 11th, behind Cavan, Monaghan, Waterford county, Clare, Galway county and Longford. Mayo also moves up one grade, from an F to an E.

Appendix 2, the table of figures on page 43 of the 44-page report, was removed from An Taisce’s website on Wednesday. Yesterday, its press officer, Charles Stanley-Smith, blamed an “internal screw-up” for the incident. He said a paragraph for the table should have been included explaining that the first column of figures was being omitted from the total. He said that it had been decided to omit the overzoning indicator figures from the total score.

“In our original calculations, we felt that indicator one gave unfair advantage to city councils, because as cities are mostly zoned, it is significantly more difficult to overzone a city. So we only counted the last seven indicators.”

He admitted the ensuing results were confusing and that “a mistake had been made in the counting. It’s an error we didn’t explain”. He added: “The report wasn’t really about rankings.”

An Taisce later issued a statement to The Irish Times. “We are working right now on a new appendix, which will show the original scores, counting indicators two to eight and the revised scores counting all eight. We will also regrade the authorities accordingly. Whereas individual authorities may improve in their grading, it does not affect the overall messages of the report that there is a strong correlation between councils that have scored poorly and a range of negative socio-economic and environmental outcomes.”

John Condon, county secretary of Mayo County Council, yesterday called on An Taisce to withdraw the report entirely. “They published their report earlier in the week, and it generated headlines. Then they quietly dropped the appendix of figures from the website. Now they’re trying to move the goalposts on it. I would say this report is so seriously flawed it should be scrapped. They were unable to do simple arithmetic. How can anyone trust An Taisce now?”