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Capacity and best practice

Presentation

Capacity and Best Practice

  • Inconsistency between councils
  • Lack of confidence in decision making
  • Time delays, fees, compliance costs
  • Excessive requests for information
  • Plans take too long and are risk averse
  • Limited assessment of outcomes achieved

Feedback

Industry meeting, Wellington 28 June 2004

  • Capacity of applicants is an issue (as well as capacity of councils and submitters)
  • Government work more closely with industry groups, management and professional groups
  • Compulsory accreditation
    • good idea
    • cost issues
  • Capacity issues
    • need better monitoring and research so can better identify sources of capacity problems then can design solutions to problems, eg. lack of money, lack of specialist staff, governance
    • more training in best practice resource consent application making for applicants (especially chief executives and senior managers) and managing conditions on consents
  • Capacity of councils
    • regional centres of excellence
    • shifting expertise from one council to another to process tricky consents
  • Quality Planning website needs ongoing funding

     

NGO meeting, Wellington 29 June 2004

Discussion group one

  • NGOs need to be supported
  • Funding - participating in the system on issues
  • Recognition - assistance for their role in the community, taking advocate role for the good of the community
  • Way that hearings are held. Less adversarial and less legalistic. Access to legal aid. No certainty of outcome.
  • An example from Australia; If one side isn't using lawyers then the other side has to as well. Level justice approach.
  • What about an independent government/legal adviser. Unless Ministry for the Environment gets resources to better engage on the ground implementation. To do it yourself. Need to support communities. The system is not a level playing field
  • Building capacity and Best Practice
  • Is the performance of the central agent good enough? No. Frameworks need setting
  • National standards?
  • Local authorities need clearer frameworks to do the job
  • Pesticides example - status quo
  • Local people often identify a problem they can still approve something that isn't in the public interest
  • We lack strong environmental vision in political leaders - so rhetoric seems to be more important to ministers than the hard decisions to make a statement such as the Sustainable Development Programme of Action
  • Survey on growth showed New Zealanders didn't think growth was the only answer and yet the living standards are around clean, green image
  • No commitment from government to introduce solutions that fit with what the NZ vision/culture wants
  • Balance between competing interests?
    • People getting services they want and the profit growth issues seem to dominate central government decision-making
  • Review performance issue - local councils assuming that most practices are frequently avoiding public notification until someone knows about it, who may want to have a say.
  • Clarity on what and when gets notified
  • Who decides public notification at local government level

Discussion group two

  • To implement the vision captured in the RMA needs resources, visions, goodwill, common goals for NZ
  • Capacity building needs resources for:
    • government (Ministry for the Environment and others)
    • local government
    • developers (not usually an issue)
    • public via NGOs and individuals
  • The biggest failure is in the failure of government to facilitate discussion on options (to big issues).
  • No discussion on best practice
  • No discussion on sustainability

Industry meeting, Auckland 30 June 2004

  • Planning is part of the service which business gets for paying rates
  • Performance: Process redesign:
    • apply 80/20 rule
    • penalties for not processing in agreed "reasonable timeframe"
    • pre-approved applications "Green tick"
    • via outsourcing if necessary
    • consistency of plans as well as process
  • Customer service
    • shared service "business" solution
    • accredited certifiers
    • reduce transactions
    • contract with government to deliver service level and "name & shame" - "you can't manage what you can't measure"
    • Auditor General to audit performance
  • Decision making
    • accredited decision making - 50 percent must be certified
    • Ombudsmen - to deal with "20 percent". Use experience in Building, UK/US for job description
    • Quality Planning website - web & paper based, decision tree

Last updated: 6 May 2008