Regional Planning Hub

New: Assistance for flood-affected councils

Learn about the additional support for flood-affected councils

Planning support for rural and regional councils

The Regional Planning Hub is a program established in 2020 to support rural and regional councils plan and develop their municipalities and shires.

The program provides statutory and strategic planning support and resources that:

assist councils with peak workloads and priority developments
build land use planning capacity and capability within councils
improve planning schemes to streamline and simplify processes and approvals
assist with significant regional planning projects

The program is managed by Regional Planning Partnerships. This team works with rural and regional councils to grow and realise economic development.

As part of the program, assistance is available for:

statutory planning
strategic planning
professional development

Rural and regional councils can submit a request through the Regional Planning Hub portal linked below.

Priority will go to requests that meet all or most of the Regional Planning Hub criteria.

Requests will be assessed and prioritised against the 4 criteria set out below.

Need for assistance

Must demonstrate:

A need for surge support in statutory or strategic planning that will deliver outcomes on the ground
The need to improve the council’s planning and economic development capacity

Statutory and strategic alignment

Assistance will support a matter of demonstrated sound planning need.

Social, environmental and economic impact

Assistance will:

contribute to regional Victoria’s liveability.
support economic development and recovery in regional Victoria.

Planning improvement

Assistance will deliver an improvement to a planning scheme or process.

Please see below for more information on the eligibility criteria.

Regional Planning Hub eligibility criteria (PDF, 80.6 KB) and (DOCX, 96.7 KB)

Regional Planning Hub application portal

If your council meets the eligibility criteria and would like assistance:

Start your application

Please note: Council users must first gain initial access to the portal. Please contact the Regional Planning Partnerships team for any queries regarding access.