Pre-Lodgement Engagement With Council

The most expensive planning problems are the ones found after the design is documented.

A pre-lodgement meeting costs a fee and a few weeks and it is where those problems surface while they are still cheap to solve.

What it is

A formal meeting with council's assessment staff, before an application is lodged, where a proposal is presented and discussed.

It is not an approval and it is not binding. What it produces is written advice on the issues council expects to assess, which is the most useful document available at that stage of a project.

What it settles

**Which pathway applies.** Whether the proposal is exempt, complying development or requires a full development application, and whether a state policy pathway applies instead of the local controls. That branching decides the programme, and the options are set out in [planning pathways for special use accommodation in NSW](/blog/planning-pathways-for-special-use-accommodation-nsw).

**Which controls bite.** Height, setbacks, site coverage, landscaped area, car parking, floor space. Council will say which of them they consider non-negotiable and which they will consider a variation on.

**What referrals are required.** Heritage, bushfire, flooding, traffic, contamination, a water authority, a roads authority. Each referral is time, and knowing the list up front means they run in parallel rather than being discovered in sequence.

**What the application has to contain.** The reports, plans and assessments council expects, so the application is complete on lodgement. An incomplete application is the single most common cause of a stalled assessment.

**Who the neighbours are and what they will say.** Council usually knows the history of a street and the objections a proposal will attract.

Why it matters specifically on a modular project

Assessment staff see modular proposals less often than conventional ones, and an unfamiliar construction method generates questions during assessment unless it is explained before.

So the meeting is where the method is described: that the building is fabricated off site to the same code requirements, certified through the process described in [who certifies a factory built building](/blog/who-certifies-a-factory-built-building), delivered and installed over a short window, and permanent rather than temporary.

That last distinction matters most. A proposal read as a temporary or relocatable structure is assessed differently from a permanent building, and the difference frequently hinges on the applicant having said which it is. The distinction is in [relocatable versus permanent modular](/blog/relocatable-versus-permanent-modular).

The other modular specific items worth raising:

**Transport and installation,** including the route, the crane position, any road occupancy required and the duration. Council's roads and traffic staff would rather hear about a crane in a street at pre-lodgement than at a condition stage. The logistics are described in [crane selection and lift planning](/blog/crane-selection-and-lift-planning).

**The roof form,** where a control requires a pitch that interacts with transport height, as covered in [the roof on a modular building](/blog/the-roof-on-a-modular-building).

**The staging,** because the sequence of site works then installation reads differently from a conventional construction programme and affects any conditions about hours and access.

What to bring

Enough to have a real conversation and not so much that it looks fixed.

A site plan with the proposal on it, dimensioned. Simple elevations. The site survey, which is needed regardless and is described in [the site survey and what it must show](/blog/the-site-survey-and-what-it-must-show). A short written description of the proposal, the use, the occupancy and the construction method. And a list of the specific questions you want answered.

A fully documented design is the wrong thing to bring, because the point of the meeting is to find out what has to change.

What to do with the advice

Treat the written advice as a scope for the application.

Every issue council raised gets addressed in the submission, explicitly, so the assessment officer can see it has been dealt with rather than having to ask. An application that answers the pre-lodgement advice point by point assesses faster than one that ignores it.

And where council's view makes the proposal unviable, that is a finding worth having before the design fees are spent. The constraints that decide a site either way are in [site constraints that decide modular viability](/blog/site-constraints-that-decide-modular-viability).

How we deliver. Discuss a project.

MADEmodular / MADEbetter.