29 September 2011
The NSW Government has announced that a Local Planning Panel would be examining the Standard Instrument with a view to recommending changes to the Minister. The panel will be composed of departmental and local government representatives, with a chairperson who has been approved by both.
In response to an invitation by the government we have prepared a policy paper setting out our concerns with the Standard Instrument, in its current form.
Our papers key observations are set out below.
Firstly, under the current Standard Instrument, business and industrial land that was previously available for retail development, fast food outlets, large format hardware stores and office development faces prohibitions and/or heavier restrictions. Some residential land has also faced down-zoning (particularly from medium density to low density). Some land, particularly rural land, faces more restrictive environmental zonings. Some plans have proposed lower height limits and lower floor space ratios.
Standard Instrument-compliant LEPs are not simple or easy to comprehend either. For example, the City of Sydney’s proposed new high prescriptive plan is 524 pages – longer than the NSW Occupational Health and Safety Act (92 pages), the state’s Food Act (104 pages) and even the Stamp Duties Act (238 pages). Further changes were made in 2011 which further increased the degree of micro-regulation.
Secondly, outside of the regulators (the Department of Planning and Infrastructure and local councils), there has been widespread recognition that the Standard Instrument is far too prescriptive and proscriptive in its text. For example, the Productivity Commissions report on The Performance Benchmarking of Australian Business Regulation: Planning, Zoning and Development Assessments made some important findings that are of particular relevance to the Standard Instrument.
Finally, we should make it clear that we recognise that Standard Instrument-related reviews may lead to the favourable up-zoning of some land. This is important and is supported by the industry. However, this can take place with or without the Standard Instrument itself. The local environmental plans based on the pre-existing model provisions are capable of delivering development up-lift, if a decision is made to do so.
We continue to support strategic reviews of the development capacity in each local government area. However, our concern is that the Standard Instrument process has also delivered significant (and threatened) down-zoning of land. If the Standard Instrument is not improved, our preference would be for any further increases in regulated development capacity to be delivered via amendments to existing local environmental plans.
Some of our recommendations involve deleting provisions in the Standard Instrument that force councils to be more restrictive than some would choose to be.
Other recommendations involve preventing councils from instituting pre-determined sweeping bans and prohibitions, to allow a greater degree of merit assessment in the context of an actual development proposal.
The Urban Taskforces full policy paper is available here.
