The NSW Planning Portal may well have more than 12 million page views each year, but one wonders how much real information is actually being conveyed.

While more information appears to be supplied to prospective builders about individual sites, less and less appears to be available to people seriously interested in planning and development trends in a locality.

Taking Complying Development Certificates (CDCs) as an example, some basic information used to be available via the Application Tracker such as numbers and locality of current CDCs.

However even this scant information is not now available, thanks to an apparent "glitch" in the NSW Planning Portal software.

Of course it's not just information about CDCs that is affected by the glitch, it's information about every kind of development application.

However, in the case of ordinary development applications, alternative sources are available, such as Council websites.

Most people don't even know what a complying development is, until one lands next door.

If a development complies with a set of rules decided by the State Government it doesn't need to go through the council's assessment process.

In the case of Complying Developments, it seems the State Government has decided that complete secrecy is the key to "expediting development".

In my opinion this is why the glitch does not look like being fixed anytime soon.

The situation is much worse for Central Coast residents than for any other council in the Greater Sydney Area.

The regulations require that certifiers must give two weeks notice to neighbours prior to a CDC being issued.

The list of councils for which this is mandatory appears to include every council in the Greater Sydney Area including Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury but not Central Coast Council.

The only notice that has to be given to neighbours on the Central Coast is two days prior to construction starting.

In other words neighbours can receive a letter in their letterbox on Friday and the bulldozers arrive on the Monday.

You can't even get this information from the old Planning Portal.

The NSW Planning Portal does not do what it says it does.

I have spent over a month from August 7, when I first noticed this problem, till now trying to get NSW Planning to fix the problem.

Their own documentation states that dropdown filters can be used for a "wider query" on submitted applications.

Their "How to use the Application Tracker" says so.

Three of the filters do not "drop down", they are frozen.

These filters are "Status", "Council" and "Development Type", which includes CDCs.

Prior to August 7, I regularly used the Application Tracker to retrieve data on CDCs for the Central Coast Council with no problems. This is now not possible.

NSW Planning Support seem to be quite uninterested in fixing this problem.

Initially I reported the problem by using the "feedback" button on the Application Tracker page.

After two weeks the recipient (Crown Land) decided that I needed to raise a technical issue with Service NSW by emailing ePlanning.support@planning.nsw.gov.au, which I did.

In reply I was informed: "Your enquiry has been received and your ticket number is P-1049278. We will attend to your enquiry as soon as possible."

This was on August 20.

In frustration, on September 1 when there was no sign of any progress, I sent the following email: "There appears to be no progress on this problem.

"Basic metadata on development applications for an LGA, particularly CDCs, is effectively being censored by the inoperability of the dropdown parameters in the Application Tracker application.

"Surely such basic information should be open access?

"Please let me know if NSW Planning actually intends to fix this glitch and allow access to the information, or is it a deliberate policy to disable this search facility?"

In response I received a puzzling email that told me to contact the web publishing team, supplying a link that didn't work.

When I replied telling the sender this, they said that the web publishing team would contact me directly.

Guess what? They didn't.

I have also received an email from the original recipients of my complaint informing me that they considered the case was resolved.

Surely this glitch must be affecting hundreds of people if not thousands.

SOURCE:

Email, 29 Sep 2024

Frank Wiffen, Woy Woy

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