In the waning days of the last Parliament, five pieces of legislation giving effect to water and resource management reforms were enacted. In response we have updated the LTP guidance that you can find in our LGSectorGoodToolkit.
These five key pieces of legislation were:
- the Natural and Built Environments Act
- the Spatial Planning Act
- the Water Services Legislation Bill
- the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Bill
- the Water Services Entities Amendment Bill.
The legislation ‘baked in’ the reforms into the 2024 LTP – mostly through changing the required information disclosures in schedule 10. The Water Services Entities Amendment Bill also provided a legislative steer with how councils should deal with matters such as setting rates in charged if their water entity is standing up part way through a financial year. This has become all the more important as it appears six of the ten entities will stand up in this way.
We’ve updated our suite of LTP guidance to reflect the changes made throughout the process. This has been released over the past two weeks. This includes:
- Living Through the LTP: Managing the Long-Term Planning Process – a guide to the project and process management of a successful LTP including the LTP readiness assessment and LTP quality assurance checklist
- Jigsaw 2024: Piecing it Together – a quick reference to the entire range of processes and content requirements that make up a successful LTP
- Dollars and Sense 2024 – the guide to finance and infrastructure in the 2024 LTP.
- Telling our Stories 2024 – guidance on preparing and using LTP consultation documents as the basis for community engagement under the Local Government Act.
All guides are available through the LGSectorGoodToolkit. If you don’t know your council’s password please contact info@taituara.org.nz
We have been able to get these out less than a month after the passage of the legislation. This would not have been possible without the diligence and attention to detail of our Finance and Corporate Planning reference groups, as well as the support of the Department of Internal Affairs, the Office of the Auditor-General, the National Transition Unit and Judith Cheyne and Jonathan Salter of Simpson Grierson.
These will be reviewed after the election should this be neccessary.