The Ministry for the Environment has released the National Monitoring System (NMS) data for the year ending 30 June 2019.

The NMS collects detailed information from local authorities on their responsibilities under the Resource Management Act 1991, including functions, tools and processes. It provides transparency to the New Zealand public on how councils are fulfilling their duties under the RMA. It also highlights RMA processes that are working well, what can be improved and where further development is needed.

The ministry says that for the first time, the release also includes a trend report based on the previous five years of local authority resource management implementation data.

The report highlights trends in areas, such as; timeliness for consent processing, application fees, consent application approval rates and Iwi/hāpu participation in resource management.

Where supporting data is available in the NMS, the report provides insight into why the trends are occurring.

A public access, web-based application, called Resource Consents Explorer, has also been released to provide greater transparency and access to explore, compare, and contrast the data collected through the NMS over the past five years.