Story by The Sydney Morning Herald.
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PROPOSED CHANGES to New South Wales planning laws will mean Byron Shire Council will determine fewer development applications, but will be responsible for more regularly and clearly devising planning controls for local areas.
Other proposals include requiring councils and state planning agencies to develop community participation plans, closing loopholes allowing developers to add size to buildings once they are already approved, and simplifying council codes determining the height and shape of local developments.
“We are not after headlong development of any kind,” said the Planning Minister, Rob Stokes. “But we also need to provide more homes,” Mr Stokes said, citing Treasury figures that there was under-supply of about 100,000 homes in NSW.
Mr Stokes’ proposals would allow him to direct Council to use independent panels to review development applications.
Such panels would be made up of two independent experts and a community representative from a pool nominated by a council.
“Under this model, elected councils set the strategy, policy and standards for development on behalf of their constituents, while technical assessments and decisions are made by independent experts in line with council’s framework,” the Department of Planning’s summary says.
“The benefit of this approach is that it helps to depoliticise and improve the thoroughness and quality of decision-making and, over time, increase community confidence in the planning system.”
Mr Stokes said his view was that councillors were better served developing over-arching plans for a community, while professional experts were better at determining compliance with those plans.
Mr Stokes said he felt it was better to try and simplify the existing planning laws, rather than create new laws that could lead to more uncertainty in the planning system.
“This is about evolution not revolution,” Mr Stokes said.
Another proposed amendment would allow the Secretary of the Department of Planning to step in if major developments were being slowed by a failure of other government departments to response to planning applications.
And measures will be introduced to make it more difficult for developers to modify applications once they have already been approved.
“We don’t want modifications to be a backdoor route for a developer to get what they always wanted,” Mr Stokes said.