Our companion guide covers whether you need a development application at all. This one starts after that: the application is lodged, the council is assessing it, and the question is whose decision it ends up being.
The panel, and what it is for
The council describes it in its own words:
The Central Coast Local Planning Panel (CCLPP) is an independent panel of qualified people to
review and determine development applications for the Central Coast Local Government Area,
providing increased transparency, integrity and confidence in the development application
assessment process.
The point of a panel is the applications where a council deciding on its own account looks uncomfortable. A ministerial direction sets out which ones, and for the Central Coast there are four groups. Conflict of interest: the applicant or land owner is the council itself, a councillor, a senior council planning officer, a member of state or federal parliament, or a relative of one of them. Contentious development: 10 or more unique submissions by way of objection, where unique means substantively distinctive rather than a petition or a form letter, unless the council has its own submissions policy approved by the department Secretary. Departure from development standards: a contravention of more than 10 per cent, or of a standard that is not a number. Sensitive development: designated development, demolition of a heritage item, new licensed premises of three named kinds, sex services and restricted premises, residential apartment development of four or more storeys, and any application where the developer has offered a planning agreement.
That storey qualifier is worth pausing on, because it is not in the equivalent list for most Sydney councils. The Central Coast sits in the direction’s second schedule, written for the larger councils, and there the apartment trigger only bites at four storeys and above. A three storey apartment building on the Coast does not reach the panel on that ground alone. It may still arrive by another route, most often the objection count or a departure from a standard, which is the door our reporting on the panel’s 20 August agenda found every item that day had walked through.
What moved on 16 January 2026
Above the panel sits the Hunter and Central Coast Regional Planning Panel, appointed mostly
by the state, which has always taken the largest applications. In January the state began moving
that work back down. The department’s own fact sheet is explicit:
All regionally significant development applications lodged after 16 January 2026 are
delegated to the relevant Local Planning Panel for determination on behalf of the relevant
Sydney District or Regional Planning Panel.
Most applications already in the system moved
with them.
You can only receive that delegation if you have a local panel to receive it, and this is
where the Coast is unusual. The same fact sheet:
Local Planning Panels have been established in all local government areas of Greater Sydney,
as well as Wingecarribee, Central Coast, and Wollongong local government areas.
That is the
whole list. Three council areas outside Greater Sydney, and the Central Coast is one of them.
Everywhere else in regional New South Wales, including the councils immediately north of us, the
regional panel carries on exactly as before.
So a Coast application of, in the department’s words,
capital investment value (CIV)* over $30 million
that would once have been decided by a
panel chaired from outside the region is now decided by the panel that meets at Wyong. Two
things do not move: rezoning reviews, because
Rezoning reviews will remain with the relevant Sydney District and Regional Planning
Panel
, and any application where
A council assessment report has been provided to the relevant Sydney District or Regional
Planning Panel before 16 January 2026
.
Whether this is more local control or more local workload is the honest open question, and
the department raises it itself: it is not anticipated that this change will significantly
increase council workloads. However, there may be a need to run additional Local Planning Panel
meetings as required.
That is a testable prediction, so we tested it below.
Who sits on it, and why it is never the same four people
The panel is four people at a time, drawn from a much larger pool. The council’s own
description: The Panel generally meets monthly on a rotating roster with at least one Chair,
two experts, and one community representative at each meeting.
The chair is not the council’s appointment.
The Chair has expertise in law or in government and public administration. The Chair is
appointed by the Minister for Planning.
The Central Coast chair is the Hon Terence Sheahan,
with Jason Peirca and Heather Warton as alternate chairs.
The experts are the council’s appointment, but only from a list it does not write: they
are appointed by Council from a pre-selected list of experts provided by the Department of
Planning
. The council names 13 of them, with declared expertise across
planning, heritage, urban design, environment, law, engineering, and traffic and transport. It
also names four community representatives and four alternates, most covering
all five wards.
The practical consequence of a rotating roster is that which four people decide your application is a scheduling outcome, not a fixed bench. If you are following a particular application, the membership for that meeting is on the agenda, and it is worth reading rather than assuming.
How often it actually sits, counted
The council publishes its panel agendas and minutes on a document portal, and the portal goes back to July 2021. We counted every Local Planning Panel meeting it lists.
| Year | Meetings listed |
|---|---|
| 2021 (from July, when the portal begins) | 10 |
| 2022 | 20 |
| 2023 | 19 |
| 2024 | 16 |
| 2025 | 12 |
| 2026, to 24 August | 9 |
86 meetings in five years, and the yearly count has fallen every year since 2022. Against the department’s prediction of possible additional meetings, 2026 is running at about 1.15 meetings a month against 2025’s 1.0, so slightly up on last year and well below the 1.67 a month of 2022. There is no step change after January in the meeting schedule.
Two cautions, because a count like this is easy to over-read. A meeting is not a decision. The panel also determines applications electronically without meeting, and those minutes are published separately on the council’s website rather than appearing in the portal’s meeting list, so the table above counts sittings and not workload. And a single meeting can carry one item or several. What the table does show is the rhythm a resident can plan around: roughly monthly, on a Thursday, usually at midday.
None of this changes how you object
Wherever the decision lands, the council does the assessment and runs the exhibition. The
department describes the panel arrangement plainly:
The council assesses the application and shows it to the public as usual but then presents
its findings to the planning panel instead of its own council officers for approval.
Your submission goes to the council, on the council’s timetable, and it is the council officers’ assessment report that reaches the panel. What changes is who reads that report and signs the consent.
Two council pages that will send you wrong
This is the part worth knowing before you go looking, because we went looking and hit both.
The council’s Regional Planning Panel page, last updated 28 October
2025, still calls the body the The Joint Regional Planning Panel (JRPP) is appointed by the
State Government and relevant local councils.
and still gives the threshold as
Development with a capital investment value over $20 million
, with a referral band of
Development with a capital investment value between $10 million and $20 million which is
referred to the panel by the applicant after 120 days
. The department’s current figure
is over $30 million, and its current referral band runs to $30 million. The
page also predates the January 2026 delegation entirely, so a reader working from it would
expect the regional panel to decide an application that now goes to the Coast’s own.
The council’s Local Planning Panel page has a different problem. It carries a link labelled as the panel’s meeting agenda and minutes, and that link goes to centralcoast.infocouncil.biz, which returns a 404 both to a plain request and in a real browser. The minutes the page does list itself run out at 20 February 2025. The route that works is the document portal, and the only place we found it linked was from the archived agendas page rather than the panel page itself.
Neither of these is a scandal and we are not going to inflate them into one. They are the ordinary decay of a large council website, and the panel’s actual agendas are published on time. But a resident who wants to know what is about to be decided about their street is exactly the person who follows those two links, and both of them currently lead somewhere unhelpful. That is worth saying out loud, and it is fixable in an afternoon.
How we made this
Read on 24 August 2026 from the instruments themselves rather than from guidance about them: the NSW planning department’s January 2026 fact sheet on changes to the planning panel system, its pages on regionally significant development and on local planning panels, the NSW Planning Portal’s about planning panels page, the Local Planning Panels Direction that sets the referral criteria, and Central Coast Council’s own local planning panel page, panel members page, regional planning panel page and document portal. Every passage in quotation marks is verbatim from one of the sources listed below.
The meeting counts were taken by reading every Local Planning Panel row on the council’s document portal, 86 in total between July 2021 and August 2026, and then checking the portal’s archived documents view, which holds no panel rows at all, so the active list is the complete portal record. The portal begins in July 2021, which is why that year is marked partial; the council directs anyone looking further back to a separate archive. The counts are of scheduled meetings, not of applications or decisions, for the reason set out above.
The referral criteria come from a ministerial direction that the department publishes as a photocopied scan with no text layer, so it cannot be searched or read aloud by assistive software. We read it as page images and describe its contents rather than quoting it, which is why no sentence attributed to that document appears here in quotation marks.
What we have not established: whether any regionally significant application has yet come before the Central Coast panel under the January delegation. The portal lists meetings rather than the value of what is on them, and settling it means reading the agendas one at a time. That is a piece of work rather than a footnote, and it is the obvious follow-up. We have not contacted the council, hold no interest in any application mentioned, and this is general information about a public process rather than planning advice.
Sources
- NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Changes to the planning panel system in NSW, fact sheet, January 2026 (read 24 August 2026): the 16 January 2026 delegation of regionally significant applications to local planning panels, the list of council areas with an established local planning panel, the treatment of applications already assessed before that date, the position on rezoning reviews, and the department’s expectation about council workloads and additional panel meetings.
- NSW Planning Portal, About Planning Panels (read 24 August 2026): the current capital investment value threshold of over $30 million and the other categories of regionally significant development.
- NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Regionally significant development (read 24 August 2026): the referral band up to $30 million after 120 days, and that the council assesses and exhibits the application before presenting its findings to the panel.
- NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Local Planning Panels Direction: Development Applications and Applications to Modify Development Consents, signed 6 May 2024 (read as page images 24 August 2026): the placement of Central Coast in the second schedule, and that schedule’s criteria for conflict of interest, contentious development, departure from development standards and sensitive development, including the four storey qualifier on residential apartment development.
- Central Coast Council, Local Planning Panel (page states it was last updated 23 July 2026, read 24 August 2026): the council’s description of the panel and its purpose, the four member composition and rotating roster, the list of published minutes ending at 20 February 2025, and the meeting agenda and minutes link to centralcoast.infocouncil.biz.
- Central Coast Council, Local Planning Panel panel members (page states it was last updated 16 July 2025, read 24 August 2026): the roster description, the chair’s qualifications and ministerial appointment, the named chair and alternate chairs, the 13 named expert members and their declared areas of expertise, and the four community representatives and four alternates with their wards.
- Central Coast Council, Regional Planning Panel (page states it was last updated 28 October 2025, read 24 August 2026): the Joint Regional Planning Panel naming, the $20 million threshold and the $10 million to $20 million referral band quoted above.
- Central Coast Council, agendas, minutes and business papers (read 24 August 2026): every Local Planning Panel meeting listed, from 22 July 2021 to 20 August 2026, from which the yearly counts were taken, and the archived documents view which holds no panel rows.
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