vpp reform

34 posts

Button Mashing: The Housing Statement and Planning Reform

Urban Planning

Still from the Buster Keaton short "One Week" in which Keaton examines a misshapen, poorly built house.

The Victorian planning framework for residential development needs reform.

That is not to accept the much more dubious proposition that the planning system is a significant cause of our current housing affordability problem. However day-to-day the planning system doubtless causes frustration and costs for individual applicants, and enormous difficulties for the council planners (mostly) charged with administering it. Reforming such provisions is an intrinsic good that is worth pursuing.

I also do not believe that means sacrificing other planning outcomes (amenity protection, character outcomes, urban greening, etc) in the name of either process efficiency or overall housing supply. Hard choices between system efficiency and policy outcomes might need to be made if the system is already optimised to achieve its intended outcomes. But where the system has obvious deficiencies, we can focus on remedying those before evaluating the need for more radical changes.

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Visualising Deemed-to-Comply ResCode

Urban Planning

On 22 September 2023 all planning schemes in Victoria were changed to make a range of the ResCode Standards (which apply to single houses, and medium density housing up to four storeys) deemed-to-comply. This is a change that has been suggested for a while, and which I have long argued against (I wrote a long post about it here, which goes into the long messy history of this issue).

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Loosening Your Belt to Cure Obesity: Rethinking Standard Vehicle Sizes

Urban Planning

Diagram showing the current B85 dimensions for a car space.

Standards Australia are currently revising AS/NZS 2890.1:2004 – Parking Facilities – Part 1: Off-street car parking, the standard that underpins the design of most vehicle circulation spaces other than roads. (The consultation closes November 9). The proposed amendments include enlarged standard car park sizes, reflecting underlying shifts in the so-called B85 and B99 design vehicles. These are vehicles that are supposed to represent the 85th and 99th percentile vehicles on Australian roads – in other words, 85 percent of vehicles are below the B85 size, and 99 percent are below the 99 size. The B85 vehicle, in particular, is the standard vehicle around which buildings and car parking structures are designed.

However cars have been getting bigger, particularly with the popularity of SUVs and large dual cab utes, and the standard now proposes to reflect this with larger design vehicles and parking spaces.

This has, gratifyingly, received some media attention and pushback; there are dozens of comments on the draft new standard arguing against the change. Lewis Mumford famously compared adding lanes to roads to trying to solve an obesity problem by loosening your belt. As apt as that metaphor was – arguable fat-shaming aside – it is even more appropriate for car parking spaces. Increasing the size of car parking spaces to accommodate ever-larger vehicles is an exercise in futility, and is terrible public policy. It will exacerbate the tendency to car-dominated built form, and loosen one of the few disincentives to the purchase of over-size vehicles.

But how does this play out when what is being changed is a technical standard?

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Out now!

Urban Planning

Front cover of the book The Victorian Planning System (second edition)

The new edition of my second book, The Victorian Planning System: Practice, Problems, and Prospects, is out now.

The book has been comprehensively revised, with factual updates throughout. It has also been thoroughly re-theorised, drawing more on literature about regulatory design, and more carefully drawing put principles of good decision-making and good system design. As a result its critique of the operation of the system has been considerably sharpened. I think I’m much clearer now than I was in 2017 about why the Victorian system – which seems so sound in theory – has performed so disappointingly over recent decades. I also try to outline an alternate approach to system design that I argue can lead us away from the repeated cycle of unhelpful or counterproductive reform that we have seen over the last two decades.

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Coming Soon…

Miscellany Urban Planning

The new edition of The Victorian Planning System: Practice, Problems and Prospects is now available for pre-order from the publisher’s page, with an expected publication date of ~~April~~ June.

I’m really pleased with this new edition, which is very thoroughly rewritten, including a thorough review of the concepts about system design and decision-making. My aim has been to write a book every Victorian planner feels they should own.

More will follow soon, but for now, here’s the blurb:

The Victorian Planning System: Practice, Problems and Prospects is an accessible introduction for all those who use the Victorian planning system, including planners, lawyers, councillors, developers, design professionals and community advocates. It explains key terminology and processes in simple terms and explores how the planning system is used to pursue policy goals. This discussion is contextualised through examination of a variety of planning policy challenges, including housing affordability, activity centre planning, and climate change.
This second edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to address changes since 2017. These include the finalised Plan Melbourne 2017-2050, the “Smart Planning” program, integrated Planning Policy Framework, revisions to residential development provisions (including the Better Apartments Design Standards), and the new Environment Protection Act, among others. Other new or heavily revised content includes discussion of planning in growth areas, biodiversity offsetting for native vegetation removal, and Aboriginal heritage.
This edition also includes reconceived discussion of decision-making and regulatory design. It reviews the history of planning system reform in Victoria and explores why the system is still not as effective, efficient or transparent as it should be. In response, the book outlines a vision of a new planning paradigm that is more capable of achieving bold policy goals. It is essential reading for all Victorian planning professionals.

The publisher’s page is here.

Does VicSmart Work?

Urban Planning

Anyone who has read my book about the Victorian planning system (amongst many other things I’ve written) will know I’m not a fan of the VicSmart system of fast-track permit applications. I have long argued that it has made the system more complex to administer, and creates a punishing, staff-burning grind at councils without providing any notable tools to help them assess applications. The system has contributed to system bloat – it is a big part of why the General Residential Zone has increased from its simple and clearly-structured six-and-half pages in 2013 to a much more complex 12-and-a-bit now, for example – and led to some clearly poor outcomes, such as preventing the consideration of sustainability issues on applications for solar panels.

However I was interested in what we can see from the data about whether VicSmart is achieving its objectives, considered on its own terms purely as a fast-track mechanism. I came up with the following three graphs from DELWP’s PPARS permit activity data.

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Who Needs Context and Character?

Urban Planning

Neighbourhood character is a clear example of an issue which cannot be reduced to simple rules. It requires qualitative assessment and the exercise of judgement. Similarly drafting a prescriptive standard to achieve objectives of building articulation to reduce bulk has proved unsuccessful. The focus of assessment of development proposals should always be on outcomes, not the satisfaction of rules for their own sake.
ResCode 2000: Part 1 Report – December 2000

The new DELWP paper Improving the Operation of ResCode: A New Model for Assessment -open for consultation here until next week – is presented as a streamlining of a cumbersome set of existing controls. It presents the alluring possibility of a world in which residential development standards set a fully objective baseline, and the kind of discretionary assessment currently applied to residential development is essentially only required when those standards are varied.

The premise is understandable – the ResCode controls are complex to administer (whether they are disproportionately complex is a different question, to which I shall return). The lure of efficiencies to be achieved with a truly objective baseline for assessment – especially when paired with not-yet-existing-but-foreseeable digital tools that would automate the initial compliance screening – is compelling.

But the paper presents a shortcut. It assumes the current controls can be modified into such objective standards without a rethink – indeed, it wrongly suggests that what is proposed is more-or-less just clarifying the controls so that they worked as intended.

The problem, though, is that the paper underestimates the role that the flexibility and discretion built into the current controls currently play. It suggests a streamlining of controls without doing the additional regulatory design work that would make this feasible. It therefore removes the aspects of ResCode that currently work to achieve acceptable outcomes, without adding back in sufficient mechanisms to take their place.

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Victorian Planning: Re-thinking the Model

Urban Planning

This article is a belated posting of an article that first appeared in the October 2019 VPELA Revue. It is based on the talk I gave at the 2019 VPELA state conference.

What happened to Victorian planning in the 2000s?

It was a heady time. We had a long period of political stability a state level with the Bracks / Brumby government seeing out (almost) the entire decade. We had a brand-new planning system, with the VPPs having been introduced in the late 1990s and implemented by the early parts of the 2000s. And as of 2002 we had a new planning strategy in Melbourne 2030. This was a “no excuses” environment for urban planners.

Yet we didn’t get much done. The planning system wasn’t able, for example, to do much in the way of driving core Melbourne 2030 objectives such as intensifying housing close to transport and activity centres. By 2007 the implementation of Melbourne 2030 was subject to a critical audit, and in the latter years of the Bracks / Brumby government it had been informally deprecated. The system seemed as complex and burdensome as ever.

The reasons for those failures are complex and cannot be fully explored here. For now, I want to focus on the role of the VPP system itself. On the face of it, the VPP system’s (relative) failure is puzzling. There is a logic and rigour to the system’s design that is compelling. Why hasn’t it worked better?

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Reforming Reform: Smart Planning is not the Answer – So What is?

Urban Planning

In 2017 the Victorian Auditor-General released a scathing report into the Victoria’s planning system.

It reported that:

Governments, state planning departments and councils have directed significant effort over many years to reform and improve the system. Despite this, they have not prioritised or implemented review and reform recommendations in a timely way, if at all. The assessments DELWP and councils provide to inform decisions are not as comprehensive as required by the Act and the VPP. DELWP and councils have also not measured the success of the system’s contribution to achieving planning policy objectives.

As a result, planning schemes remain overly complex. They are difficult to use and apply consistently to meet the intent of state planning objectives, and there is limited assurance that planning decisions deliver the net community benefit and sustainable outcomes that they should.[1]

Furthermore, it noted that “past reforms have had little impact on fixing other systemic problems impeding the effectiveness, efficiency and economy of planning schemes.”

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When Less is More: Why Smart Planning Will Stymie System Reform

Urban Planning

This piece was written for the December 2017 issue of Planning News.

By the time you read this the Smart Planning program will have completed its consultation period after the release of its October discussion paper on the VPPs. The state government will be attempting to roll out its reforms exceptionally quickly, with some material promised by the end of the year and gazettal of a final package of VPP reforms expected by July.

It’s a nerve-rackingly short timeframe. The pace of change invites doubt about the genuineness of the consultation – is there really scope to stop, think, and potentially change course if the consultation raises legitimate issues about the package proposed? Is it long enough to sufficiently “debug” a complex set of changes? I fear not. This is, unfortunately, a deeply problematic set of reforms.

The problem with system reform like this is it all sounds great – yay! Smart! – but the problems are in the detail. This is why the timeframe allowed for the reforms is so challenging; it is also why it is difficult to unpack the issues with this paper in the space available here. Suffice, then, to make a few key points.
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