Local Land Services Regulatory Impact Statement

Background

Local Land Services (LLS) is a regionally based NSW Government agency focused on land management and biosecurity, delivering services to farmers, land managers and the wider community across areas including landscape management, biosecurity, emergency management and primary production.

The Local Land Services Regulation 2014 supports the Local Land Services Act 2013 and provides the legal and administrative framework that enables Local Land Services to deliver services across these focus areas. The Regulation was due for staged repeal on 1 September 2026, which meant Local Land Services needed to consider whether the Regulation should lapse, be remade without change, or be remade with amendments.

Allowing the Regulation to lapse would have created a significant regulatory gap. Businesses, communities, government agencies and the environment would have been impacted by reduced regulatory clarity, weakened service delivery, and there would have been impacts to areas such as biosecurity, emergency response, native vegetation management, stock movement and travelling stock reserves.

Our role

NineSquared was engaged to prepare a Regulatory Impact Statement to assess the impacts, costs and benefits of options for the proposed Local Land Services Regulation 2026. The assessment considered three options: remaking the existing Regulation without change, allowing the Regulation to lapse, and remaking the Regulation with proposed amendments.

The work involved reviewing the legislative and regulatory framework, identifying the need for government intervention, assessing the proposed Regulation, and considering the impacts of each option on businesses, communities, government and the environment.

NineSquared’s analysis found that remaking the Regulation without change would allow the Act to continue operating, but would miss the opportunity to improve the clarity, consistency and ease of application of the Regulation. It also found that allowing the Regulation to lapse would create significant negative impacts, because the Act could not operate as intended without a supporting Regulation.

The preferred option was to remake the Regulation with amendments. The proposed amendments were found to streamline and modernise the Regulation while retaining the existing policy intent. Most changes were assessed as immaterial and focused on improving clarity, readability, consistency and ease of application. One material change related to the formal designation of Cobar Shire Council as the controlling authority for three specified stock watering places in Central West NSW.

The Regulatory Impact Statement concluded that remaking the Regulation with amendments was the best option to achieve the purpose and objectives of the Local Land Services Act and would provide broad benefits to the community, businesses, government agencies and the environment.

The full Regulatory Impact Statement can be viewed on the LLS website, here.

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