Melbourne industrial and commercial land use plan

The Victorian Government has strong policies and strategies in place to protect employment land, deliver local jobs and improve Melbourne’s economic performance and productivity.

Ensuring enough well-priced industrial and commercial land is available in the right locations will help drive investment and provide jobs for our growing population.

The Melbourne Industrial and Commercial Land Use Plan (2020) builds on policies and actions from the metropolitan planning strategy, Plan Melbourne 2017-2050 and its five-year implementation plan.

The plan – known as MICLUP – provides an assessment of current and future needs for industrial and commercial land across metropolitan Melbourne, putting in place a planning framework to support state and local government to more effectively plan for future employment and industry needs.

MICLUP also outlines further implementation actions for state and local government to better plan for and protect employment land. These include a future review of employment zones, stronger planning policy and guidance, a more sophisticated methodology to assess supply and demand for industrial land and the development of local industrial land use strategies.

Planning Scheme Amendment VC215 , gazetted in March 2023, gives stronger effect to MICLUP in the Victoria Planning Provisions, providing additional clarity and certainty around how state-significant and regionally-significant industrial and commercial precincts are planned and ensuring that they can operate efficiently and remain viable.

The amendment:

• introduces MICLUP as a state policy document
• inserts new state planning policy that aims to preserve locally significant industrial land for industrial or employment generating uses
• inserts new regional planning policy for metropolitan Melbourne to protect industrial land of regional significance, facilitate continual growth in freight, logistics and manufacturing investment and support the transition from manufacturing land uses to other employment uses in strategically identified areas
• introduces subregional-level planning policy that identifies strategies to protect employment land supply and jobs across metro Melbourne – reflecting the policies and strategies outlined in MICLUP.

You can view MICLUP via the documents tab on this page.