insight into challenges plaguing the NSW Planning System.
Planning and related requirements have grown exponentially over the last few decades, yet resourcing to deal with said regulations has not grown to match.
This means Council officers and the LEC are left to grapple with increasingly complex and voluminous applications without the expertise needed to process it in a timely manner.
The natural result, which is plain to see, is that approval processes get tied up in knots. Councils and Government Departments can't keep up with assessments, and timeframes blow out.
I had not appreciated that the LEC had not seen an increase in judges in the 45 years since its inception!
My natural instinct is to prefer less regulation, but that stems from the timeframes and uncertainty involved. This angst would reduce if regulators and assessors were: ✅reasonable and pragmatic; ✅acted like time mattered and; ✅appropriately resourced
🌠Wishful thinking, perhaps, but if you take the time out of regulation, it's impacts greatly lessen.
The article also touches on the attitude of many Local Councils which game the system. Their approach is simple: ⌛Fail to meet statutory timeframes; ❌Force applicants exercise their legal rights for failure to determine and lodge an LEC appeal 🖋️Instead of continuing to progress the application in the meantime, officers put pens down due to the "affront" of being taken to the LEC 🧑🏻⚖️Lawyers become involved and throw the kitchen sink at the applicant as punishment 💰All waste years and hundreds of thousands of dollars for no benefit 🆘Given the no of appeals to court, Council staff are redirected to working on those matters, forcing more applicants to go to court in the first place!
It's a vicious, yet avoidable cycle.
And the cherry on top – Councillors complaining in the media about ratepayer money being wasted on court cases due to developers taking them on, when the ball is entirely in their "court". 🎾
This is the predictable result of a highly adversarial planning system coupled with a lack of resourcing and no personal responsibility for authorities. The situation is identical in Victoria.
Without repercussions for the poor performance of authorities which should be model litigants, applications will clog up the court system and delay housing from being built.
🤔Speeding up dispute resolution by investing in the court system would be a big improvement and would unlock far more economic activity than the small investment for Government.