[IanWatson]

Some of the changes are nice quality-of-life things, like the CAO being able to discharge DAs and not needing newspaper ads. However, this is not going to save any meaningful amount of time on applications. The formal approval process isn't all that long and, more importantly, it's generally very predictable. Once you get your application into the committee stream, etc. you have a very good sense of adoption timelines and can plan for it.

The big delays in planning approvals are in actually getting into the formal approval pipeline.

I'm really concerned about the loss of the heritage committee.