Providing authorisations

Resource consents, permits and other authorisations are key mechanisms for delivering environmental protection. They:

• Contribute to environmental, economic, social and cultural outcomes for Waitaha Canterbury by ensuring that rules and regulations designed to protect the environment and cultural values are translated into practice while allowing economic activity to continue
• Act as a contract between the holder, the community and Environment Canterbury as the consenting authority
• Are a resource user’s licence to operate and set out the conditions they must adhere to.

This service includes Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) consenting, gravel permits, and building consents for large dams (a dam that has a height of four or more metres and holds 20,000 or more cubic metres of water (or other liquid)).

The measures focus on RMA resource consent applications as this is the majority of our work in authorisations, with 1,500-2,200 applications received each year.

More information

Service measure 2, which tracks our compliance with processing consent applications within statutory timeframes, has an increased target of 95% for 2025/26 (up from 50% in 2024/25). At the end of quarter four, 82.7% of consents decided met the statutory timeframe. This result is affected by several longstanding consents that are in independent decision-making processes outside of the control of this regional council. Given the expected volume of applications for the remainder of the financial year and the number of independently controlled consents still to be resolved, it was not possible to achieve the target of 95% by 30 June 2026. This result for the year-to-date reflects several consent decisions relating to consent applications that were lodged some time ago and have already missed the statutory deadlines, bringing the overall percentage of decisions within the statutory timeframe down.  

Of applications lodged and decided since 1 January 2025, 92.3% met statutory timeframes. For those lodged and decided since 1 January 2026, 98.7% (293 out of 297 applications) met statutory timeframes - surpassing the 95% compliance target set for this measure.