Brisbane City Council has been working hard to accommodate measures to address coronavirus and manage the impact on the services we provide.

Development Services delivers services ranging from prelodgement and development assessment to plan sealing and plumbing.

While we will continue to offer our full range of services, we have evolved our business delivery to ensure the health and well-being of our staff, customers and community is maintained.

Changes in effect

  • Prelodgement meetings will be held online instead of in the Brisbane Square Library Development Lounge.
  • We no longer offer the physical inspection of files, but our Planning Information Officers can continue to assist customers.
  • Sealing of survey plans and Community Management Statements (CMS) will continue, however we are changing the way we interact with our customers. Effective Tuesday 31 March, Council has introduced dedicated times to drop off and pick up survey plans and CMS documents. If you are lodging or collecting a survey plan or CMS, please do so on Tuesday or Thursday, between 3pm and 3.30pm at Level 16 Reception, Brisbane Square.
  • Site visits must be conducted in accordance with new social distancing guidelines. First you should assess the need for a site visit with officers. Consider if there is a way to conduct the site visit virtually or with fewer people present. If a site visit is deemed necessary, the following measures will be adopted to minimise the transmission of coronavirus:
    • Inspectors will adhere to social distancing requirements.
    • Council officers will not enter premises if occupants are in self-quarantine due to coronavirus.
    • Council officers will not enter premises if occupants are showing symptoms of illness such as coughing sneezing or fever.
    • Plumbing officers will phone ahead and request that people on site open any required doors, and operate taps, toilets and other plumbing items requested by the Plumbing officer.

Other possible impacts

There may be changes to processes which require signatures on hard copy documents or the need to scan older hard copy files (for example, Infrastructure Agreements and survey plans for plan sealing).

Planning and Development Certificates may be delayed in circumstances where Council:

  • needs to restore a physical file from storage
  • does not receive the required input from external authorities, or
  • requires expertise or physical access to a site that is unavailable due to quarantine.

In these situations, we will not issue an incomplete certificate due to the risk this creates for customers. We will notify you of the delay, and work to issue a complete certificate as soon as we can.

We appreciate your patience as we work through how we can safely and efficiently continue to deliver services during the coronavirus pandemic. As the situation continues, we may need to rapidly adapt more processes and will do our best to contact anyone affected.

More information

For more information, please phone Council on 07 3403 8888 and ask to speak to the Development Services team.