Meeting Half-Way: A Collaborative Approach to Permit Assessments

One of the most dispiriting things about day-to-day statutory planning is the paper warfare. Consultant planners prepare a report justifying their proposal; given the length and repetitiveness of planning schemes, that might be twenty or more pages long. Council officers then prepare their own assessment, but for various reasons they tend not to rely a great deal on the applicant’s report. Apart form the description of the proposal – the bit that applicants know a Council planner will always read – many consultants’ reports are not especially useful as the starting point for Council’s assessment. I suspect most planners will know the kind of report I mean: huge slabs of text cut and pasted from the scheme; permit triggers incorrect, incomplete, or scattered through the text; glib and formulaic non-responses to the real issues of merit; and so on.

There’s a cycle here, in that the less Council officers rely on application reports, the more sketchily they are done, reinforcing the tendency of local government planners to give them fleeting attention. Meanwhile, Councils have traditionally tried to encourage better documentation through the issuing of extensive application checklists listing every last thing to think about. This increases regulatory burden, and further reinforces the trend towards over-documented but under-thought applications. And when Council officers finally come to assess the application, they largely start from scratch, duplicating work that in many cases has been – or should have been – done by the permit applicant. The whole process sees a lot of paper exchanged, but too little communication and co-operation between Council and consultant planners in getting applications across the line.

Is there a way to ensure both better applications and a more co-operative process? The most prominent model for such an approach in recent years has been Glen Eira’s pre-application certification model, which won an Award for Planning Excellence in 2001. The Glen Eira model sees applicants undergo a lengthened pre-application process, after which they submit a report from a private planner certifying that the application meets State and Local Planning Policy. In return, the Council commits to advertising within 5 working days of lodgement and aims to decide the application within 3 weeks.1 I have no direct experience of Glen Eira’s process, so can’t comment on its implementation in practice, but its chief difficulty in conception lies in its placing of so much weight on the provision of a certifier’s report. After all, compliance with State and Local policies is very much in the eye of the beholder; it’s not a simple matter that can be outsourced, and certifiers are not truly independent if they are paid by the applicant. And since the Council isn’t freed of its assessment burden, the subsequent fast-tracking of the application seems a disproportionate reward for simply providing a properly documented application. Despite the early interest, pre-application certification per se has not been widely adopted, although other Councils have adapted various elements of the process (such as increased emphasis on pre-application meetings) to their needs.

However, it seems there may be a simpler and less formalised approach to breaking down the barrier between Council and consultant that doesn’t involve any muddying of roles. Simply put, we need a better way to share the work, while at the same time quarantining the assessment process as something that needs to be undertaken purely by Council. I don’t pretend there is any rocket science in what follows: my emphasis here is on ironing out the seemingly insignificant impediments that, in practice, stop Councils relying on consultant reports to any meaningful degree.

The key to this is recognising how much of an application report could be either adopted wholesale, or at least used as a starting point, in Council reports with minimal threat to their independence. After all, there is much in a typical planning report that is essentially factual: site descriptions (including accompanying photos and aerial photographs), list of planning controls, lists of applicable policies, outline of a site’s planning history, and so on. This usually gets duplicated by Council officers, and as much as Councils try to streamline the report-writing process with standard templates and the like, that background material still takes up valuable time to document.

Of course, officers do sometimes seek electronic copies of reports from applicants so that they can cut and paste extracts, but in my experience there are two main impediments to doing so that have stopped this practice being widespread. Firstly, variations in format (both in terms of report structure and the literal formatting of the text) make it sufficiently fiddly that it is often simpler for the officer to just write it themselves from scratch. Secondly, popular reporting practices in both the public and private sector have tended to mix factual information and assessment information together in a manner that makes unpacking the two elements more difficult. I’m thinking here of the popularity of the “call and response” report format: reports structured around a series of clause / assessment pairings (“Clause X applies; and here is my response to clause X.”) Such a structure tends to bleed objective facts and subjective assessment together throughout the report so that it is impractical for the report to be adapted by the Council officer.

Could this problem be avoided if we took a typical report format, adapted from the DPCD’s model structure, and split it in two?2 The aim here is to quarantine the information that can be used or easily adapted by Council from the parts of the report that needs to be essentially original to Council’s report to ensure independence. The structure could break down into two parts, with subheads as follows:

Part 1 – Factual Information

  • Summary
  • Site and Location Description
  • Proposal
  • Planning Controls (headed by a list of permit triggers listing the precise clauses; followed by  listing – but not discussion – of pertinent policies or provisions)
  • Planning History
  • Referrals Required
  • Exemptions from Notice

Part 2 – Application History and Assessment Information

  • Referral Responses
  • Notification and Objections
  • Assessment
  • Conclusion / Recommendation
  • Conditions / Grounds of Refusal

My suggestion is that having prepared their desired internal report format with this division in mind, the Council’s document template for Part 1 be made available for applicants to use. An applicant would then supply this section of the report in Council’s desired format: not just the structure, but a fully formatted electronic document including all the formatting as per Council’s usual delegate  report template. This would then be supplemented by the applicant’s own justification / sales pitch in whatever format they liked. When they came to assess the application, Council would then revise Part 1 as much or as little as required, typing over and correcting information as necessary, and then proceed right on to completing Part 2 informed by the consultants report, as now occurs.

While such a format obviously could be standardised across Councils, or rolled out as a wider initiative, one key advantage of this approach is that nobody needs to wait for some system-wide reform that may or may not appear. It could be implemented voluntarily by whoever thought it was a good idea, and the extent of roll-out might vary: Councils might at first directly approach their “regulars,” or simply make the templates available on their websites. There is also obvious potential for such an approach to be aligned with electronic lodgement initiatives; but again, it is not dependent on the implementation of such measures.

The emphasis in such a process should be on true collaboration, with its adoption by applicants entirely voluntary. We have enough difficult-to-satisfy checklists and onerous information requirements already: provision of a Council-ready report should not be another hurdle for applicants to jump. If consultants find it too much hassle to tailor reports for individual Councils they shouldn’t have to. Likewise, unlike the Glen Eira model, there should be no implicit or explicit quid pro quo whereby applicants are promised a quicker turnaround for using the format; such agreements seem inherently prone to compromising Councils and causing false expectations amongst applicants. Rather than creating a heavy-handed, highly regulated exchange between Councils and consultants, the intention is to give Councils a more structured answer to the often-asked consultant question: “what can I do to help you get this done?” The underlying assumption is that consultants do not need an additional motive to help Council planners assess their applications; neither carrot nor stick should be required.

This approach would also encourage a better quality of report from applicants, since they could more clearly see the benefit of the time they spend on the document, and it would force them to turn their minds to aspects of reports that, at the moment, are frequently sloppy in the reports submitted to Council. And while I have concentrated here on the private / government planner collaboration, it should be obvious that there would be considerable benefits in providing untrained applicants, or related professionals such as draftspeople and  architects, with access to Council-friendly  templates.

The idea of reformatting and distributing some templates might sound anti-climactic. However, that’s part of the point. Planning reform does not need to be drastic or hard. Sometimes small, easy wins can make a big difference. The practical impediments to using consultants’ reports in this way are seemingly trivial – hinging as they do on the vagaries of report structure and document formatting – yet they are real enough to prevent such collaboration occurring in a widespread fashion. And while the timeframe benefits might seem nebulous – “how long does it take to describe the proposal anyway?” – my own experience is that having a formatted, ready-to-finish report as a starting point would in fact save considerable time for Council officers. The approach outlined here would allow genuine sharing of workload to occur much more frequently, without compromising the independence of Council’s assessment. All that is required to get started is a little time spent on some document templates, and a few emails to regular applicants.

Originally published in Planning News 35, no. 3 (April 2009): 14-15.

Notes

1. Pre-Lodgement Certification Program Certifier / Applicant Information Kit, Glen Eira City Council, September 2007. Available by request from City of Glen Eira.

2. The model DPCD template is available at http://tinyurl.com/69euow.