NSW Local Development Performance Monitoring Report 2013-14 released
The NSW Department of Planning and Environment has released the Local Development Performance Monitoring Report for 2013-14, which reveals an increase in both the volume and value of approved developments compared to previous years.
The publication is the ninth in a series of annual reports that provide an overview of the performance of the NSW planning system and information on local and regional development determined by councils, private certifiers and joint regional planning panels.
In 2013-14, the number of development applications (DAs) determinations arrested the decline from the three previous years. Overall development activity (which includes DAs and CDCs) increased by 12 per cent (a total of 84,159 approvals) and the value of approved developments increased by 17 per cent to $28.69 billion compared with 2012-13.
Average determination times were slightly longer than in the previous year (an additional 1.1 days). However, 78 per cent of councils achieved median net determination times of 40 days or less.
Property development industry group, Urban Taskforce, said the report shows a growing swing to complying development, with almost 25,000 complying development certificates determined by council or private certifiers in 2013-14 – which represents 29 per cent of all determinations.
“This demonstrates that consumers of the planning system are increasingly working within the rules set for complying development which is leading to shorter approval times,” said Urban Taskforce CEO Chris Johnson.
“The processing time for larger projects above $20 million is still around 230 working days which is almost a year. The regional panels are also taking this long on average and reforms that shorten these times would help the development industry keep costs down.”
Source: News Release, Urbanalyst, 24 February, 2015