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1 Executive Summary

This report presents the findings of a review of several councils following the results of the 2005/06 Resource Management Act Biennial Survey of Local Authorities.

The survey revealed a decline in performance of councils in meeting statutory timeframes for processing resource consents as set out in the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA).

In light of the declining survey trend, the Minister for the Environment directed the Ministry for the Environment Chief Executive to conduct an immediate review of several councils to explore the reasons for the decline.

The councils selected for the review were a representative sample of councils who had either a low level of compliance with statutory timeframes and/or a high use of section 92 of the RMA.1

The review involved analysing resource consent processing data from each council and an onsite review at each council to discuss performance with council staff.

The Ministry found that delays in processing resource consent applications occurred for a number of reasons, the main ones being:

  • Acceptance of poor quality applications – The applications accepted by some of the councils seemed to be of poor quality and section 88(3) is rarely used to return the poor applications to the applicant.2 The councils tended to use section 92 instead to gain further information to allow processing of the application to continue.

  • Delays in gaining information from other parties – Consent officers at all the councils refer aspects of resource consent processing to other divisions of the council or to external agencies for comments and advice on specific aspects of the application. Referrals (however well monitored or managed) inevitably use up processing time. We found the most common kind of referral was to council asset engineers.

  • Tracking of resource consents – While most of the reviewed councils had an electronic tracking system in place that enabled some tracking of the processing of applications, the systems were not being used to their full extent to effectively manage workflow.

  • Information and communications technology – Several of the councils reported problems and ‘lost time’ obtaining and coordinating the outputs from different software systems across the council (in particular, financial systems). Those problems may be no worse than typically found in large organisations but there is some scope for time saving if these systems were improved.

  • Complex planning reports and conditions for minor applications – We found that consent officer reports and conditions for minor applications were long and complex. Reports often include multiple recitals of what the application is for, which plan provisions are relevant and why others do not apply. We looked at the time recorded by consent officers in two councils and this data suggests that minor resource consent report writing can take several hours, often over a third of the time the consent officers spends processing the entire application.

  • Shortage of consent officers – The majority of the councils reported difficulty in recruiting and retaining enough skilled planning staff to deal with the resource consent workload.

  • Level of priority put on meeting statutory timeframes – Having a culture in place within the resource consents team (and those other parts of the council that have input) that strives to meet the statutory timeframes was found to be one of the biggest factors influencing council performance. That is, the degree of importance compliance with statutory timeframes is given appears to influence timeframes.

Processing times could be shorter if some of the reasons identified above were addressed so that consent officers can focus on their core task of assessing applications.

1 Under section 92 of the RMA, a council may request an applicant to provide further information relating to the application. The application is put ‘on-hold’ (ie, the processing time stops) while the further information is made available to the council.

2 Under section 88(3) of the RMA, councils can return incomplete applications to the applicant if the application does not include an adequate assessment of environmental effects or the information required by regulations.

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