Northern Beaches Council took 87 days on average to decide an application, and on landslip-risk land the engineer's report comes before those days start

What the Council's own count says

Each quarter and each financial year the Council publishes a development activity report, and it says it follows applications from lodgement through to determination. For 2025/26 it reports an average processing time of 87 days and a median of 72 days, across 1,672 determined development, modification and review applications. The year before, the figures were 75 days and 54. The April to June 2026 quarter on its own ran to an average of 111 days and a median of 91.

An average above the median means some applications took much longer than the typical one. At the median, a decision took more than two months, and the last quarter on record was slower than the year.

What that figure does not cover

The count is for every kind of application together, from house extensions to commercial buildings and apartment blocks. The page we read gives no separate figure for applications on landslip-risk land, for those that need a geotechnical report, or for anything involving underpinning, and it does not say how time spent waiting on an applicant is counted. So 87 days is the best published measure of the Council's pace, and it is not a forecast for one house.

The report that comes before the clock

Beacon Hill sits under the Warringah plan's Landslip Risk Map: each of our five sample points there fell on mapped land, in areas the plan labels A to E. Council's DCP control E10 says what an applicant on that land must lodge. In Areas B and D it is a preliminary assessment of site conditions by a suitably qualified geotechnical engineer or engineering geologist, submitted with the application, and a full geotechnical report and a hydrological assessment as well if that assessment finds one is needed. In Areas C and E it is the geotechnical report and the hydrological assessment from the start. Any report must include a risk assessment of landslip for both property and life, with regard to Australian Geomechanics Society guidelines. In Area A, Council may decide it wants the preliminary assessment.

Those documents go in with the application, so the engineer's work is done before lodgement, and the Council's count runs from lodgement. On mapped land the 87 days is therefore the second part of the wait, not the first. How long an engineer takes to inspect a site and write a report is not something the Council or the control says, and we have no source for it.

Where underpinning comes in

Underpinning is work under a footing that has lost its ground. CSIRO's footing guide says that where the cause is local shear or erosion, cracking will usually continue to develop until the original cause has been remedied, and that monitoring of cracks in walls and floors should always be treated seriously. Where the cause is a leak or a stormwater failure, its remedy is to repair that, which is plumbing or drainage work for a plumber or drainer and not underpinning at all.

Set beside a wait of roughly a quarter of a year, that gives a homeowner things worth asking a provider before signing. Is the job development that needs an application at all? The control and the Council's page do not answer that, and we found no source that does. Who commissions the engineer's assessment, and when, given that it has to exist before lodgement? And what will be done about the cause of the movement in the meantime? The answers change the price and the order of work. This site cannot give them, because it does not do the work.

What could still change

The control quoted is from the Warringah Development Control Plan 2011, which the Council's planning controls page still lists as current. A draft Northern Beaches LEP and DCP were on public exhibition from 20 July to 30 August 2026, and the Council says the draft LEP must be considered in development assessments beside the existing controls. The map or the control could change. Every figure here was read on 21 September 2026.