Run internal council referrals concurrently and publish their queue times
Traffic, engineering, waste, landscape and heritage teams assess different things and rarely depend on each other's findings, yet are commonly worked through in sequence.
Steps this would change
Rationale
Internal referrals are the least scrutinised delay in multi-dwelling assessment. Each individual referral is short -- days, not weeks -- so no single team appears to be the problem, and each can honestly report good turnaround. The delay is created by the sequence, and sequence has no owner.
Because the database records each referral as its own step with its own body and its own dependencies, this shows up as a large gap between the serial duration and the critical path. That is a structural finding rather than a complaint about any team.
The second half of this proposal matters more than the first: publish the queue time for each internal referral team. A delay nobody measures is a delay nobody is accountable for, which is also the argument made on the transparency side of this project.
What is being traded away
Concurrency has a real cost: rework. If the traffic assessment changes the layout, landscape and waste assessments done in parallel may need redoing, and staff time is the scarcest input in most planning departments. Sequential assessment is not purely habit -- it avoids wasted effort on designs that are about to change.
The honest version of this reform sequences only the referrals that can genuinely change the layout, and parallelises the rest. That requires knowing which is which, which requires the data this database is trying to collect. There is a real risk of implementing the reform before the evidence exists to target it, and getting worse outcomes for busier staff.
Precedent
Larger councils that have moved to concurrent internal referral with a single coordinating planner.