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Only half of NSW councils are meeting their residential development assessment processing targets.
The Property Council of Australia (PCA) has said that it’s time to start cracking down on councils that can’t speed up their development approvals.
Analysis by the PCA of the latest council performance league table gathered by the state government showed that just 54 per cent of councils are on target with their approval timelines for residential applications.
The data drop from the NSW government also revealed that there are 8,500 unresolved development applications and requests for development certificates spread across the city’s councils.
In response, PCA’s NSW executive director, Katie Stevenson, said it was up to the NSW government to take action against councils that were lagging on their approvals.
Stating that there was “no more room for excuses,” she urged the government to make use of the new performance improvement orders (PIO), introduced earlier this year. This gives the Minister for Local Government the authority to issue instructions to councils on action they must take to improve performance.
“Penalties are pointless if you’re not prepared to use them – the NSW government has seen approval performance plummet across dozens of councils yet taken no action to use performance improvement orders introduced earlier this year.
“The Property Council NSW has made repeated calls for government to give a ‘red card’ to underperforming NSW councils, and while the PIO approach has been adopted, it hasn’t been used once,” she said.
To date, no PIOs related to residential development performance have been issued to NSW councils.
NSW recently recorded the lowest month for dwelling approvals since January 2023, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ data out of September showing that the number of new homes given the go ahead tumbled 15 per cent compared to the previous month.
Stevenson flagged that the coming data releases would likely bring further dwindling approvals.
“The end of the year is in sight, which generally means a slowdown in activity until early next year – if the Minns government means business when it comes to housing, we need to see action now,” she said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Helmke
Based in Sydney, Juliet Helmke has a broad range of reporting and editorial experience across the areas of business, technology, entertainment and the arts. She was formerly Senior Editor at The New York Observer.
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