Last week’s judgement by Mr Justice Peter Kelly against Meath County Council in the case of Darlington Properties Limited makes sobering reading. The Judge awarded Darlington €4,060,000 on the basis that the Council had misrepresented the opportunity available to Darlington to construct a distributor road to link a property it purchased from the Council to the Ashbourne Town Centre.
In fact there was no such opportunity as the Council had previously granted planning permission on adjacent lands to Nuas Investments Ltd. that precluded the possibility of such a road being built. This fact did not become apparent to Darlington until after they had purchased the lands from the Council. In fact it did not become apparent until they commissioned a full planning search on all adjacent properties. However the Council were in possession of that fact, and in the opinion Mr Justice Peter Kelly, by incorrectly making reference to the potential future existence of such a distributor road in the brochure of sale, the County Development Plan and various correspondence and dialogue they were guilty of misrepresentation.
It’s unfortunate for Darlington Ltd., Meath County Council and the ratepayers of County Meath that this situation has arisen. It’s even more unfortunate when one considers that with the appropriate use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) it could have been so easily avoided. So how could GIS have helped?
Recording the polygonal extents of all Planning Applications in a GIS is the practise of many Local Authorities. The topological operators in a GIS can then evaluate issues such as overlap, adjacency or proximity. This would have enabled the Council to become aware that planning permission previously granted to Nuas precluded the possibility of Darlington constructing a distributor road.
Meath County Council's Online Planning System
Publishing these polygonal extents on an interactive mapping system linked to the Council planning database is also now the norm. However the Meath County Council system restricts itself to displaying only the centroids of Planning Applications. Had the full polygonal extents been published Darlington may have had a better chance to become aware of the problem with the lands they tendered to purchase.
Relying on human interpretation of the complex topological relationships between planning applications and other constraints layers such as development plan zoning, heritage constraints or environmental constraints is not infallible. At Esri Ireland we have been working with a number of Council’s to develop a constraints analysis algorithm that will analyse any planning application (or any other shape) for its spatial relationship (intersects, contains, crosses, touches, overlaps, proximity etc.) with any constrains layer published from an authoritative source. Had this software been freely available on the Internet to Darlington they would have been easily able to check any constraints to their intentions on the lands for which they tendered. In fact it would have been open to anyone including the Council to do the same.
As is so often the case the crux of this matter is information – who knew what, about where and importantly in this case, when. I would be very surprised if Meath County Council deliberately misled Darlington at the time of sale. It seems more likely that there was a human error, a process failure or a system failure. I do think that this failure could have been detected much earlier had GIS been used more effectively along the lines suggested above. Likewise had the data underpinning the decisions been openly and publicly available along Gov 2.0 lines all parties could have made more informed decisions.
As a conclusion, we are often asked about return on investment in GIS, here is a case where a very small expenditure could have saved a very large expense!
ED
