02 April 2013
The slowing of assessment times for development applications from 68 to 71 days by NSW councils demonstrates the need for more efficient planning offices that can come from Shared Service Centres, says the Urban Taskforce.
“Despite the NSW Governments continual push to speed up planning approvals, the latest figures show we are going backwards,” says Urban Taskforce CEO, Chris Johnson. “The quickest way to get more efficient processing of DAs will be through bigger planning offices shared by a number of councils that are set up as efficient businesses.”
“There is clearly a cultural issue in the planning sections of councils where planners are becoming more risk adverse and this is particularly so in urban councils where DAs take on average 81 days.”
“Shared planning offices can also service the Joint Regional Planning Panels more efficiently as their average approval times have jumped from 185 days to 222 days. The best JRPP seems to be Sydney East, who also deal with the highest value of DAs, yet their approval times are well below the JRPP averages. The government needs to look at why this panel is outperforming the others and apply the lessons to all panels.
“The latest figures contained in the Local Development Performance Monitoring Report produced by the Department of Planning and Infrastructure gives an excellent insight into the performance of the planning system in NSW as it is currently operated by councils.
“There are some improving councils who should be acknowledged including Leichhardt who have improved their assessment times by 24%. Blacktown is still one of the highest performers with 2,714 occupation certificates and 2,020 construction certificates. Clearly Blacktown is delivering real projects that are being built.
“With the increasing number of apartments in NSW, the way these approvals are reported needs to be changed. The report indicates that only 6% of DAs were for multi-unit housing while 82% were for single new dwellings. Clearly the multi-unit DAs have many individual homes and the statistics should acknowledge this in the same way that the Australian Bureau of Statistics does.
“The Urban Taskforce has developed a schedule of how smaller planning sections from individual councils could be combined to give more effective offices of 60 to 80 staff. With staff of this number a far more efficient processing service can be achieved and a change of culture realised.
An example of a shared planning office would be to combine the planning departments of Marrickville, Strathfield, Canada Bay, Burwood, Leichhardt and Ashfield Councils into a centralised office at Sydney Olympic Park. This would replace 6 separate planning departments averaging 10 staff each with a single centre of excellence for 60 planners who can give a much improved service to individual councils and to the Joint Regional Planning Panel.