The Planning Authority's job in Canberra used to be relatively simple: assess and approve building applications in the vast greenfield developments of the expanding city.
But today, the agency faces an unenviable task. Hundreds of applications are made every year to knock down, build, develop and renovate houses and apartments in the midst of the capital's suburbs.
Industry complaints of extended wait times for development approvals as the territory government pushes ahead with its missing middle project, while public servants try to improve a convoluted planning system in an increasingly complex city.
"That requires a kind of different considerations as part of the planning system, because you've got neighbours, you've got to make sure that the size of the dwellings ... is not going to materially impact the surrounding populations, you've got all the infrastructure, so it becomes a much more complicated system to manage," top planning system official Sam Engele said.
Mr Engele is the City and Environment Directorate's deputy director-general of environment, planning and policy, a senior role in the mega-directorate formed when the ACT public service was reshaped in 2025.
Having inherited a system that has about 120 possible steps for development applications, the directorate has spent the last year trying to speed up approvals to get more buildings off the ground.
Mr Engele said the directorate had established a new unit, Development Solutions, to remove snags and improve the flow of lodged applications through processes.
"Eighty-five per cent of things will just go through with no problem, but then there'll be the complex ones which will have lots of different requirements which can get stuck in the system," he said.
"We will definitely cut some of those processes back, particularly... we have seen when we brought the directorate together, there's a few that are duplicative.
"Different areas were providing advice back, but it was not consistent, so it couldn't both be achieved."
These duplications may include similar environment-related planning processes in different directorates, rendered unnecessary when the Transport and City Services Directorate merged with the Environment and Planning Directorate and Access Canberra in 2025.
The directorate is also focused on removing the requirement for a development application for simple, low-risk builds, and allowing other projects with some variance to be declared exempt from the more complex approval process.
Complications can also continue after approval, with applications laced with conditions to comply with.
"We're really looking at, do we need as many conditions, are they achieving what we're hoping to achieve, and so, we're really trying to operate the system as a single system rather than as a series of sort of silos essentially," Mr Engele said.
Part of the work will focus on creating possible legislation changes to lease variation charges, which have been decried by the building industry and housing advocates for blocking new constructions.
The building industry has been calling for changes to the planning processes for years, as extended wait times for approval weigh heavily on developers and builders dealing with increased material and labour costs.
A Canberra family said in February they had waited 10 months for a DA for two houses to be approved after some delays from Icon Water, while an application for a large medical centre near the city was rejected due to the required removal of a 10-metre London Plane tree.
Mr Engele said as the directorate worked to direct more resources to complex applications, neighbouring agencies were following suit.
"Evo and Icon are the same, that's really where they're starting to realise that they need to shift their focus as well for these really complex ones," he said.
"I think a lot of frustration is when industry sort of expect something to be done in a certain period of time, and that may be realistic or it may also not be realistic.
"The frustration is when things take much longer than what they were expecting, so providing some certainty to the industry as to what they can expect in terms of those approvals processes."
Mr Engele said much of the planning team's work in the past year had been focused on increasing the percentage of DAs decided within the mandated timeframe. The directorate received 742 DAs in 2025-26, with a decision rate within the timeframe of 82.8 per cent.
"[It] is a real improvement, which has been as much about the focus of the teams, but also trying to remove some of these excessive processes that we just don't see the value of," he said.
The deputy director-general said he wasn't concerned about cost-cutting measures or voluntary redundancies in his directorate affecting the planning system changes.
The improvements follow changes to an outcomes-based planning system in 2023, where applications were judged on design function rather than strict geometric rules.
"When I talked to the planning assessing officers about those changes, a lot of times they said that they know that they could get a good outcome with something, but it just wasn't allowed because it didn't fit within these kind of rules that were previously in place," Mr Engele said.
"Having more flexibility as part of the outcomes-based planning system just allows them to, where they can see something is a really good design outcome ... [to] approve it."
