The NSW Department of Planning and Environment has released draft regulations that will make it easier for local councils to ‘reject’ development applications before they are assessed on their merits.
The changes are set out in a draft Environmental Planning and Assessment Amendment (ePlanning) Regulation 2017. It has been released for public comment.
The Department says that the regulation changes will ‘support online lodgement of development applications by introducing consistent documents and technical requirements across NSW’.
However, for reasons explained below, developers of complex projects are unlikely to want to use the new online lodgement process (as currently proposed).
The regulation does much more than merely pave the way for online lodgement of applications. It dramatically increases the amount of mandatory information that must be supplied up-front with a development application — even for applications that are merely lodged ‘over-the-counter’ in the traditional way.