Opinion: How councils can be more business friendly

Priority One chief executive Nigel Tutt. Photo / File

What should businesses and the public be seeking from councillors and how their councils operate in the future? What should change?
In the lead up to this year's local body elections, Priority One chief executive Nigel Tutt shares his views on how councils can make it easier to do business in the region. He argues that there is a straightforward approach that new councils can adopt to help businesses. It may be a blow to the ego, but perhaps the best council is one that you don't need to talk about much.

By Nigel Tutt

Comment: A local election topic that is important to the business community is the ease of doing business in this region. While ease of doing business relates to a number of areas, many of which don't concern local councils; they are generally involved when a company is seeking to expand, move to the area, or undertake a new development. We want to encourage businesses to expand or move here to provide job creation and prosperity for our region.

New councils will undoubtedly want to be friendly to businesses, alongside gaining positive interactions with the rest of the community. In a practical sense, what should businesses and the public be seeking from councillors and how their councils operate in the future? What should change?

In the past, I've seen councils concerned with reducing silly rules, undertaking developments to boost business or developing projects to engage with businesses. While those actions are fine, I think the biggest actions they can take are actually far more straightforward – it simply has to do with attitude and culture.

To understand how culture for a council is important, you first need to consider the perspective that a council should have. It may be a blow to the ego, but perhaps the best council is one that you don't need to talk about much – that probably means interactions with them are simple and efficient. Most businesses will happily exist without any council interaction; councils don't need to create much apart from getting the basics done well.

In terms of the basics of being business-friendly; the business community simply needs to know that consents and queries will be processed quickly, solutions found constructively and potential disruptions of growth or development will be minimised. At a more macro level, we need to be sure that residential and commercial land is available and planned, and that the region's liveability is maintained or improved through infrastructure and amenities. We must remain a great place to live as well as work.

If you view businesses (and indeed the rest of the community) as customers of the council and arrange operations accordingly, then your perspective on what is business-friendly changes. Rather than creating complex projects for engagements, it is really about ensuring you deliver basic interactions and services well. In practice, this means a positive and constructive outlook, where problems are jointly worked on with the view to solving them rather than merely applying rules, and communicating in a timely manner. Delays generally mean more cost and risk, so reducing waiting time for communication, consents etc will be a big help, particularly to our property and construction sectors.

Most of being customer-friendly comes down to culture created internally, and councillors have a big hand in that. What we would seek out of councillors is the ability to help create a supportive and customer-friendly culture. While at times, there are frustrations, the voting public would be well placed to consider the organisational effectiveness that constant staff scrutiny and criticism will breed. Candidates who can understand and apply balance between performance standards and support for staff will be well placed. Often this will be reflected in the background of a person, perhaps they have dealt with customers regularly in the past or managed a large group of people. Working for councils at either staff or elected member level can be a thankless task; a positive mindset and a team approach are essential.

So in our view, a business-friendly council is more of a culture than a rules-based exercise. Focus on culture can deliver huge gains and can be made at little cost. To do that it must be well supported by future councillors.