Water is essential to a healthy, prosperous and liveable city. As the floodplain manager for Greater Melbourne, Melbourne Water is committed to supporting the delivery of housing that meets the needs of our growing city, while managing flood risk.
In September 2023, the Victorian Government’s Housing Statement outlined an ambitious plan that will see 800,000 new homes built over the next decade. Strong, future-focused water planning is a critical component of the housing equation, and we have significantly increased our efforts to ensure our performance can support this.
In 2024 we are delivering on Melbourne Water’s Housing Roadmap (413.39 KB, PDF), which establishes key areas for improvement that will enable more development, faster.
Our Housing Statement Roadmap
At Melbourne Water, we’ve developed a Roadmap to ensure that our city’s water cycle is well planned for, and that system improvements support sustainable housing growth.
We’re helping to fast-track housing while protecting our city, environment and way of life for generations to come.
Priority actions
Our Roadmap includes priority actions under five pillars. We will focus our efforts on the most impactful actions we can take to meet housing demand, while carefully managing flood risk.
Streamlining processes and approvals:
Speeding up approvals in low-risk areas, so homes can be built faster.
Providing the most up-to-date flood information:
Providing better flood risk information early on to guide where and how development happens.
New urban areas:
Removing drainage asset roadblocks to help meet the 30% growth target in greenfield areas (land that hasn’t been developed yet).
Established areas:
Enabling our suburbs to grow by providing faster engineering advice to promote development in safe areas and quickly address any risks in flood-prone areas. This will support the 70% growth target areas.
Collaborating across the sector:
Working with government and the sector to find innovative ways to grow our city while managing risks like climate change.
Progress updates
- Flood Risk Management: A Key Outcome of the Housing Roadmap
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Melbourne Water, as part of its Housing Statement Roadmap, is progressing a new risk-based approach to assessing flood risks associated with urban development, via the Floodplain Development Impact Assessment Practice Note. Developed in collaboration with the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) and guided by the Urban Planning and Development Strategic Collaboration Group (UPD SCG), the Practice Note is now being implemented with an evaluation phase.
As Greater Melbourne’s floodplain manager, Melbourne Water (MW) has responsibilities under the Water Act (1989) to provide flood advice and establish controls on developments to minimise flooding and flood damage. We continue to meet requirements that ‘there should be no detrimental impacts to nearby properties, particularly properties downstream’, as per the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) 2019 Guidelines for Development in Flood Affected Areas).
To balance risk mitigation with responsible urban growth, the new Practice Note is intended to support a more granular flood risk management approach. It establishes:
High-level impact assessments to determine if further flood analysis is needed. A review of existing conditions to evaluate potential effects beyond the development site. Clear flood tolerance thresholds, tailored to different land types.
Staged implementation will begin with a three month evaluation phase on selected urban development projects and state-led initiatives in collaboration with the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority (VIDA). This will allow Melbourne Water to examine the breadth of its applicability and ensure there is no material risks associated with the permissible afflux. By identifying data gaps, ambiguities or practical limitations, critical insights will be identified, before any broader application.
Melbourne Water remains committed to working with government and industry partners to improve flood risk management strategies, ensuring a balanced approach that supports housing development while safeguarding communities. We may make further refinements to the Practice Note following the initial evaluation phase and will develop technical guidance resources to support internal application processes. We will ensure industry is kept informed of these updates and encourage everyone to sign up to our Planning and Development Hub, so we can keep you in the loop.
- Additional data gathering, including flood modelling and floor level surveys, to enhance decision-making.
- An iterative compliance process, ensuring projects meet flood risk requirements while supporting housing growth.
Staged implementation will begin with a three month evaluation phase on selected urban development projects and state-led initiatives in collaboration with the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority (VIDA). This will allow Melbourne Water to examine the breadth of its applicability and ensure there is no material risks associated with the permissible afflux. By identifying data gaps, ambiguities or practical limitations, critical insights will be identified, before any broader application.
Melbourne Water remains committed to working with government and industry partners to improve flood risk management strategies, ensuring a balanced approach that supports housing development while safeguarding communities. We may make further refinements to the Practice Note following the initial evaluation phase and will develop technical guidance resources to support internal application processes. We will ensure industry is kept informed of these updates and encourage everyone to sign up to our Planning and Development Hub, so we can keep you in the loop.
- Improving housing supply-related developer applications
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Over the past twelve months we have scaled up our resources and processing capacity of developer applications. We:
- redeployed staff and brought in additional staff to increase processing capacity
- streamlined processes to progress applications quicker
- improved our real-time data to help us deploy resources more effectively.
And it’s made a difference, as we eliminated a backlog in applications related to improving housing supply.
We are taking further steps to ramp up the pace at which we process current applications, with a plan created to ensure all contemporary applications (applications post 1 November 2023) meet their articulated service levels over 90% of the time by 31 March 2025.
Updates on our work and progress in achieving this objective will be provided early in the new year.
- Supporting documentation
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We have developed three guidance documents to support customers with our application processes:
Accessible document versions:
Please note we may still be working through any impacts of the above documents on other Melbourne Water webpages or systems.