The Quality Planning (QP) website
The Quality Planning website (QP) exists to ‘ promote good practice by sharing knowledge about all aspects of practice under the RMA ’ among resource management practitioners, council planners, private practitioners, consultants and environmental managers among others.
Over 70 guidance notes draw on practitioner experience and knowledge to provide best practice information on a variety of planning topics, including:
- Plan development – the entire process from start to finish
- Plan content matters – everything from historic heritage to surface water quality
- Resource consents – the complete consent processing resource
- Monitoring – a monitoring and reporting one-stop shop
- Enforcement – the complete resource for enforcement officers.
The QP website also offers a number of supporting tools, including:
- a library of resource management documents and articles
- links to resource management related legislation.
Quality assurance
In order to ensure the guidance notes are high quality and reflect current best practice, the QP partners have developed clear processes and criteria for their development, review and update.
Regular exercises are undertaken by the QP partners to identify the need for note update and development resulting from:
- changes to the legislative framework, evolving case law and new best practice
- the emergence of pressing new issues (e.g. water, heritage)
- changes to or new notes initiated by industry and sector.
The required work is then prioritised and lead partners assigned to scope the individual work programmes. Where considered appropriate and feasible, a procurement process is initiated to outsource note development/review to a consultant. Minor technical updates are often undertaken by experts within the QP partner organisations. In both cases, the guidance note is peer reviewed by the QP partners before it is published on the QP website.
The Quality Planning (QP) partners
The QP website was established in 2001 and is a partnership between the New Zealand Planning Institute (NZPI), the Resource Management Law Association (RMLA), Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ), the New Zealand Institute of Surveyors (NZIS), the New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) and the Ministry for the Environment (MfE). The QP partners group jointly make decisions about the content and direction of the website. The regular group meetings are chaired by MfE who also owns and funds the website. NZPI is responsible for the ongoing administration and day-to-day management of the website.
