The NSW Planning Portal (Portal) provides an integrated digital platform that supports effective planning and decision making across federal, state and local government systems in support of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act.
The Portal delivers a consistent and accessible customer experience and improved management of systems, with over 30 digital services sharing both planning and building performance data for increased transparency and informed decisions and makes the Portal a core platform with open data access on which whole of government initiatives are dependent.
Recent statistics supporting the broad reach and reporting capacity of the NSW Planning Portal include:
- The NSW Planning Portal hosts over 250,000 registered users including all 128 councils and over 2,500 private certifiers.
- Since 1 July 2021, it has received more than 12 million unique page views.
- During the same year, more than 101,400 development applications (DAs) with an estimated total cost of development of $97.19 billion were submitted through the Development Application Online digital service.
All digital services on the Portal provide an on-screen ‘thumbs-up, thumbs-down’ widget to measure customer satisfaction during the application process. As of the end of October 2022, the performance figure is 85.7% ‘thumbs up’ based on approximately 78,000 responses.
The ePlanning Program
The ePlanning Program is a multi-year program, partially funded by the Digital Restart Fund (DRF), to create digital end-to-end journeys for customers who seek to change the built environment through the NSW Planning Portal.
The ePlanning Program covers over 30 unique planning and development processes which have been digitally transformed and integrated, empowering customers to access digital services that enable online participation, at a time and place convenient to them.
The next round of Portal enhancements will be delivered with the support of $16.39M in funding from the DRF, and includes an upgrade to the BASIX digital service, Design Building Manual, digital mapping of Local Environment Plans, local and district plans, and development and expansion of APIs.
In the Pipeline
The next horizon for the Portal will position NSW as one of the most advanced digital planning systems in the world. With continued policy and stakeholder support the portal will act as a platform for enterprise to develop solutions that use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to reduce the administrative burden to its users.