The ACT division of the Property Council is calling for faster approvals for development applications, saying it's key to housing Canberra's growing population.
Property Council ACT executive director Gino Luglietti said meeting development application timeframes was crucial to provide enough infrastructure for the territory.
The council has two suggestions for speeding up approval wait times. It is asking parties vying for seats in the Legislative Assembly to adopt them.
First, it wants the timeframes outlined in existing territory legislation to be met.
The council also wants a fast-tracked approval system for residential projects that the government deems strategic, including medium- and high-density housing.
Mr Luglietti said that even through there was legislation about how planning decisions were made, the "line in the sand" was often moving and it was challenging for developers to understand.
"All people involved in building houses want is to know where the line in the sand is," he said.
Blown-out decision times
In the territory, most development applications must be decided on within 45 working days. This extends to 60 working days for some large projects.
All development applications since November 27, 2023, must be submitted under the new Planning Act 2023.
However, some applications begun before then are still being approved, and are considered under the previous Planning and Development Act 2007.
In July 2024, the average time to make decisions on applications lodged under the Planning and Development Act 2007 was 198 days, according to territory's planning division.
Just 11 per cent of applications lodged under the 2007 act were approved within the statutory timeframe during July 2024. In July 2023, it was 56 per cent.
Decision times under the new Planning Act 2023 were significantly better, at an average of 40 days in July 2024. Eighty-two per cent of applications lodged under the new timeframe were approved on time.
Devil in the detail
One industry source said several projects he had worked on took more than two years to be approved.
The wait time for decisions was "hit and miss" and there was no way of knowing ahead of time how long they would take.
Delays were in part because of a "front-loading" approach in the territory, where detailed design plans from engineers, architects and consultants were expected up-front.
In most jurisdictions, finer details like this are not expected until the later building approval stage.
"What we are seeing now is almost the refusal of entities [in the ACT] to approve anything unless they see the fully resolved scheme in front of them," he said.
"That is creating a bottleneck in development applications.
"Without entity endorsement, it is very hard for the [planning authority] to approve development applications.
The source felt "considerable cost" up front could also make it difficult for smaller developers to submit applications at all.
Construction shortages
Mr Luglietti said delayed decision-making was making it harder to get tradespeople during an ongoing construction shortage.
"You get tradies who go to Sydney for jobs when they don't have anything here," he said.
"Sydney, being the best that it is, constantly has jobs on the boil, so sometimes we lost those [workers] in the ACT."
Longer wait times could also increase risk of expenses being blown out.
Pressure off other services
Faster development application approval times could unlock pressure on other government areas, like health and aged care, Mr Luglietti said.
He believed part of the delay in approvals was a "lack of understanding" about developments like retirement living villages, where people live independently.
The "Retirement ready: national planning report card", published in August by the Retirement Living Council, an arm of the Property Council, said two-thirds of ACT development applications for retirement villages took more than a year to assess.
"Retirement villages [give] people a better life expectancy," Mr Luglietti said.
"They reduce the pressure on hospital systems and they delayed the entry to aged care, which saves taxpayers money."
