Waverley's Panel Overrides Its Officer 2.9% of the Time. The Decision Is Made Before the Hearing.
We set out to build a scorecard of what separates approved DAs from refused ones. Two of the three obvious predictors turned out to be measuring something else.
Waverley's local planning panel has determined 853 development applications. Of those, 385 were approved, 265 approved with modifications, 176 refused, 23 deferred and four withdrawn. Every figure below describes that panel-assessed population — not the 12,000+ DAs in Waverley and Randwick overall, of which panel items are a small and unrepresentative slice.
We began this analysis intending to publish a side-by-side scorecard: the measurable differences between a winning DA and a losing one. The scorecard did not survive scrutiny. What replaced it is more useful.
The panel almost always follows the officer
726 of those panel decisions carry a recorded assessment officer recommendation. Across them, the panel diverged from the officer 21 times — an override rate of 2.9%.
The two directions are not symmetrical. Where the officer recommended approval, the panel approved in 562 of 576 cases, or 97.6%. Where the officer recommended refusal, the panel refused in 132 of 139 cases, or 95.0%. Only seven applications in the entire panel history were recommended for refusal and rescued at the hearing.
A further 100 panel-assessed DAs carry no officer recommendation in the record at all. We report them separately rather than folding them into either column, because we cannot tell whether the recommendation was absent or simply not captured.
The practical reading is straightforward. By the time an application reaches the panel, its outcome is settled to a first approximation. The assessment officer's report — the product of months of correspondence, referrals and negotiation — is the decision in roughly 97 cases out of 100. The hearing ratifies it.
The override flag in the record is wrong
Waverley's data carries a boolean field marking whether the panel diverged from the officer's recommendation. We did not use it, because it does not agree with the decisions it describes.
Cross-checking the flag against the officer and panel outcomes on every row, it misses seven genuine overrides — cases where the officer recommended approval and the panel refused, flagged as no divergence — and it marks two cases as divergent where the officer recommended approval and the panel approved.
This matters beyond one column in one table. UNDA has previously published a 3.4% override rate for this panel, and that figure came from the flag. The correct rate, derived from the recommendations and determinations themselves, is 2.9%. We are correcting it here.
What we are not claiming
The scorecard we expected to publish rested on two metrics that look decisive and are not.
Refused applications carry an average of 8.2 recorded DCP compliance flags against 3.4 for approvals. That gap is real, but the causation runs backwards from the way it is usually presented. An officer building a case for refusal documents every control the application fails. An officer recommending approval has no reason to enumerate marginal breaches. The flag count is substantially a record of the recommendation being written, not a predictor of it.
Consultant reports look similar and are weaker still. Approved DAs average 4.2 supporting reports against 2.4 for refusals — until you notice that 43 of the 176 refused applications, 24.4% of them, have zero consultant reports recorded, against 30 of 385 approvals at 7.8%. Zero almost certainly means the reports were not extracted from a shorter refusal document, not that the applicant engaged nobody. We are not willing to publish "bring more consultants" on that basis.
Three further metrics genuinely do not separate the outcomes, and it is worth saying so plainly. Clause 4.6 variation counts are flat across outcomes at 0.95 for approvals, 0.77 for approvals with modifications and 0.80 for refusals. Project cost does not order with outcome at all: the median approved application is $619,109, the median refusal $811,550, and the median approval-with-modifications $1,350,000 — the most expensive category is the one that succeeds after negotiation. And the size of the departure sought under Clause 4.6 is not the differentiator it is often assumed to be; median departures are 24.7% for approvals and 24.7% for refusals, effectively identical, with the difference in the averages driven entirely by a handful of extreme outliers.
Where the time actually goes
One more retired claim. Refusals are not slower than approvals. Median time from lodgement to panel meeting is 140 days for approvals, 148 for refusals, and 170 for approvals with modifications. Negotiation takes longer than rejection. Any advice built on "a slow assessment means bad news" has the pattern backwards.
What this means
For a planning consultant preparing a Waverley panel application, the finding that survives all of this is the one about timing. The panel hearing is not where the application is won. It is where a decision already reached gets confirmed, 97 times in 100.
That relocates the work. The months between lodgement and the officer's report are the period that determines the outcome — the responsiveness to information requests, the quality of the design response, the willingness to modify. Those are also the months in which nothing looks like it is happening.
The metrics most often cited as approval predictors do not survive examination, and we would rather say so than publish a scorecard that reads well and misleads.
About UNDA Development
UNDA Development provides precedent intelligence for property developers and property planning consultants — every DA, every panel decision, every compliance record at your fingertips. Our sister product, UNDA Management, provides market intelligence for strata managers. Learn more at unda.management
