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It is difficult to specify time frames for processing planning applications as they vary from local Council to local Council.  Each Council has its own agenda and there are no set time limits for decisions on your planning permit application.  Within the Planning and Environment Regulations document, there is a ‘prescribed time’ which outlines the local Council has up to 60 days to process the planning application.  If this is not met, you can then lodge an appeal at VCAT for an Application for Review for Failure. This is an appeal against your local Council for failing to process your planning application within the stated time.  However, it should also be understood that the ‘prescribed time’ as show in the Regulations has a further set of rules stating when the ‘prescribed time’ stops and commences again, which could affect the overall timing of your planning application.  There are many factors involved in the consideration and processing of your planning application by your local Council, which can affect the ‘prescribed time’.  These include;

• After lodging your planning application, the local Council has 28 days to request further information
• If a request for further information is issued to you, the clock then goes back to zero, i.e. the 60 days for processing the planning application starts again from the time when the ‘further information’ is received
• The local Council may refer your application to some of the external referral authorities, such as Melbourne Water, State Government planning departments, Victorian Roads, etc due to requirements in your planning application or the location of your property and external referral authorities have 21 days to get back to your local Council for more information and then they have 28 days to respond to your local Council; this means the local Council cannot make any decision on your planning application until the 28 day time limit is completed - if this process happens, the clock stops and then starts again at the end of the 28 day referral period
• Your planning application may also be referred to other departments within your local Council, such as Building, Engineering, or Strategic Planning Departments; these departments have a further 28 days in which to respond, meaning the local Council Planning Department cannot proceed further with processing your application until all the required responses have been received
• You may be required by your local Council Planning Department to advertise your application by erecting a sign on your property and/or in the local newspaper, and you may be required to advise surrounding property owners by registered mail of your intention to develop
• Should you be required to advertise, then the local Council has to wait until the 14 day advertising period has expired before being able to make a decision; the local Council can also extend the advertising period to longer than 14 days if it wishes to do so.  The clock stops and starts again at the end of the fourteen-day advertising period.
• In cases where a large number of objections to the proposal have been received, the local Council may request a meeting between yourself, as the applicant, and the objectors to discuss matters of concern and potential ways of overcoming these objections
• In such cases, usually the local Council will delay processing your application until after the proposed meeting, in light of the fact the outcome of the meeting may well incur changes to the original application
• In cases where there are a specific number of objections to a planning application, many local Councils have a policy which states that if there are, for example, more than five objections to the application, the application must be put to a full Council Meeting rather than be decided within the local Council’s Planning Department
• These local Council Meetings usually take place once a month, meaning your planning application could be postponed for consideration until the following month should there be too many planning applications to process at any one meeting
• There could be additional factors which may influence the timing or processing of your planning application at any one time; the local Council Planning Department may be experiencing staffing problems; they may have inexperienced planning staff; there maybe a large number of planning applications being lodged or any number of other problems which could all affect your application being processed with the ‘prescribed time frame’.

It’s quite likely a local Council Town Planner could be working on up to fifty planning applications at any one time and trying to process all of them within the ‘prescribed time’ limits, however, you must remember your local Council Town Planner is only human and in many cases the processing of a planning application will just have to wait in line for its turn.  This can be frustrating but it is unavoidable and is commonly experienced within the Victorian development industry.