Lobby group believes 28-day timeframe for councils to process permit applications needs to change.
The body representing the civil and infrastructure construction industry wants the timeframe given to local governments to process heavy vehicle permit applications drastically reduced from almost one month to seven days.
The Victorian branch of the Civil Contractors Federation (CCF) has criticised the existing 28-day time limit introduced when national heavy vehicle regulations took effect earlier this year.
CCF Victoria CEO John Stewart told ATN the deadline fails to recognise the commercial realities that exist in the industry.
“Ideally it should be seven days maximum. I think one of the big issues is many, many persons in government circles don’t understand the pace at which the commercial world works. To them, 28 days for a permit is fine,” Stewart says.
“In our game, the phone call can come in one night for an expectation of a delivery the next day or the day after that and the [permit] process just doesn’t move that quick. So what we’ve got is a government process to issue a permit that is not at the same pace at which the commercial world expects.”
Stewart is hopeful of scoring a breakthrough on reducing permit timeframes but has indicated that any fix in the short-term may be hard in Victoria.
“One of the issues here is we have an election here in November so that’s going to make it a bit hard but, anyway, we’ll keep on banging,” he says.
Stewart says that prior to the introduction of national regulations most permits were issued within hours of an application being lodged, while highly complex applications took a maximum of four days to be approved.
The National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) recently told an industry gathering it was working with councils to accelerate permit application approvals through a pre-approval scheme.
Stewart wants the 79 councils in Victoria to develop set criteria for assessing permit applications to remove inconsistency.
“The solution is to get a whole of government fix. If we could get all of the local governments to have their ducks in a row and agree on a whole set of parameters then that would probably ease a lot of the individual interpretation of what should be done or what shouldn’t be done,” he says.
Meanwhile, Stewart says there has been a lot of improvement in the processing of permits since VicRoads, along with other road authorities, took back responsibility for it from the NHVR in February.
“In essence a hell of a lot of work has been done by the road authorities. It’s not perfect but instead of having two broken legs and two broken arms it’s probably got a broken wrist and broken ankle,” Stewart says.
“There is still a parcel of work to be done with local government here in Victoria to get it as smooth as it should be but that is going to take time because of the nature of the beast that is local government.”
Along with the Victorian Transport Association and the Victorian Crane Association, the CCF earlier this year took the NHVR to task for its failure to process permit applications.
The NHVR’s problems led to trucks being stranded on the roadside and freight going undelivered.
Stewart says it is hard to quantify the financial damage the NHVR caused, but adds: “I would suggest it has to be in the millions and thats just here in Victoria.”