After introducing a league table in July last year to track council assessment times, the NSW Government has turned its attention to its own agencies.
The State Government has published a State Agency League Table that holds to account the performance of 22 agencies, state-owned corporations and electricity providers.
“Delays or conflicts in approvals or advice from agencies can result in delays to a council issuing a development approval,” the government said in a statement.
The tracker, developed by the Housing Taskforce under the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure umbrella, is intended to identify the organisations that are meeting their legislated agency advice timeframe targets.
It will monitor concurrences, integrated development approvals and referrals (CIRs) across the agencies, aiming to have 90 per cent of cases per agency met within its specified timeframes.
The tracker so far has identified the worst performers of the past six months.
National Parks and Wildlife Service was at the bottom with only 33 per cent of timeframe targets met.
However, it only considered nine cases, and often deals with complex cases of developments within parks, reserves and protected areas, as well as those impacting First Nation heritage.
The NPWS was followed by Hunter Water Corporation, which provides water and wastewater services to half-a-million people in the Lower Hunter Region, at 47 per cent for 19 cases.
The Environment Protection Agency was next with 65 cases and 69 per cent.
Sydney Metro, fourth from the bottom, dealt with 14 cases, the Housing Taskforce table said, 71 per cent of which were considered in an acceptable timeframe.
Rounding out the bottom five was the Rural Fire Service, which dealt with 1804 cases in the past six months and responded to 83 per cent of them in the legislated timeframe.
Sydney Water, the Department of Planning itself, Sydney Trains and three electricity providers—Essential, Endeavour and Ausgrid—were at or above the 90 per cent target.
Transport for NSW was just below it at 88 per cent.
The new table has largely been welcomed by the industry.
Urban Taskforce chief executive Tom Forrest said it was “important for driving cultural change and improved agency performance”.
“However, there needs to be consequences for consistent poor performers.”
Forrest highlighted the approach in Queensland, which has a concierge service to assist applicants in obtaining agency consents.
The Property Council of Australia agreed while its NSW executive director Katie Stevenson also called for a review of referral duplication to avoid assessments at both planning levels.
“There is more to do. Many approved projects remain stalled due to unnecessary post-consent hurdles,” Stevenson said.
“The NSW Government must now turn its focus to clearing these roadblocks by simplifying the design modification process and making sure agencies are adequately resourced to handle an increased volume of applications.”
