Determine panel matters on a rolling basis rather than a monthly agenda
Where assessment is complete and no submissions are contested, allow determination without waiting for the next scheduled panel meeting.
Steps this would change
Rationale
This is the cleanest example of the category the database was built to find.
By the time an application reaches panel determination, the assessment is finished. The officer has formed a view, the submissions have been considered, and the report is written. What happens next is not deliberation -- it is waiting for a room to be booked.
The cost of that wait falls on a project carrying finance, and it is invisible
in every statistic that measures "assessment time", because the assessment is
over. It shows up only if you record why a step consumes days, which is
precisely what the wait_type field on every step in this database is for.
What is being traded away
There is a real trade-off here and it should not be minimised.
Panels exist partly to put decisions in public. A matter determined electronically between meetings is determined without anyone watching, and the people who made submissions lose the chance to hear the reasoning given aloud. For contested applications that is a genuine loss of accountability, and it is the reason panels were introduced in the first place after concerns about how councils were deciding significant applications.
The proposal is therefore deliberately narrow: uncontested matters only, with any objection returning the matter to a scheduled meeting. Whether "uncontested" can be defined tightly enough to prevent drift is the open question, and anyone arguing for this reform has to answer it rather than wave at it.
Precedent
Electronic determination between meetings is already used by some panels for uncontested matters; the question is how far it can be extended.