New Employ­ment Zones to com­mence April 2023 | Plan­ning & Environment

The New South Wales Gov­ern­ment has amend­ed Local Envi­ron­men­tal Plans to replace Busi­ness and Indus­tri­al Zones with new ​‘Employ­ment Zones’. 

The changes have been a long time in the mak­ing. Orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped under the for­mer Min­is­ter for Plan­ning back in May of 2021, the reforms fol­low the Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Com­mis­sion’s 2021 White Paper ​‘Reboot­ing the Econ­o­my’ which rec­om­mend­ed ratio­nal­i­sa­tion of exist­ing busi­ness and indus­tri­al zones by reduc­ing the over­all num­ber of these zones and broad­en­ing their per­mis­si­ble activities. 

The inten­tion of the new zones is to pro­mote flex­i­bil­i­ty of land use and sup­port pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and jobs growth. They seek to achieve this by pro­vid­ing areas that have a diver­si­ty of retail, busi­ness, office and accom­mo­da­tion uses to increase employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties in acces­si­ble loca­tions. The new zones also aim to pro­vide suit­able areas for indus­tri­al activ­i­ties and will sep­a­rate heavy indus­try from oth­er land uses to min­imise envi­ron­men­tal impacts. 

Busi­ness and Indus­tri­al zones have been replaced with five new employ­ment zones, to be called: 

• E1 Local Centre
• E2 Com­mer­cial Centre
• E3 Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Support
• E4 Gen­er­al Indus­tri­al; and
• E5 Heavy Industrial

Three addi­tion­al zones have also been cre­at­ed to accom­mo­date land uses in exist­ing busi­ness and indus­tri­al zones that are not pro­duc­tiv­i­ty related: 

• MU1 Mixed Use
• W4 Work­ing Water­front; and
• SP4 Enter­prise

The amend­ments were made on 16 Decem­ber 2022 but the new zones will not take effect until 26 April 2023. 

A com­par­i­son table show­ing the exist­ing zones and the new zones can be found here