2021 Best Practice Award - District / Strategic Planning & Guidance

Wellington City Council is taking a customer-centric view of how to improve its consenting and compliance functions. Their customer research, prototyping and user testing showed them that providing an online tool to guide property owners, builders, architects and planning consultants through resource consent decision-making could result in better quality resource consent applications. The first release of Resource Consent Check helps people work out if they need a resource consent for residential building work and earthworks. The benefit of this tool is that customers do not need to understand the mechanics of how the District Plan works. The tool takes the information provided through an online questionnaire and gives the customer a summary of their compliance with the District Plan and targeted advice on the policy framework for their resource consent application.

Resource Consent Check is the result of combining a suite of reusable technologies, tools and processes including software coded District Plan rules (or Rules as Code), and reusable content chucks. In the process of creating District Plan Rules as Code Wellington City Council interrogated the logic of each rule and standard, which meant nailing down their interpretation of these rules. They can see the value in this approach when developing rules as it helps them to keep the end-customer in mind when writing the rules and enables them to test the ruleset as it’s developed.

Resource Consent Check is an innovative approach to solving problems that affect both customers and council staff.