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 2025 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
The Victorian Government’s Housing Statement outlines an ambitious plan to build 800,000 new homes over the next decade.
That’s why 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
- Improving housing supply-related developer applications
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Over the past twelve months we have scaled up our resources and processing capacity. This includes introducing 30 additional staff and initiatives like the ‘flying squad’ to address a backlog in applications related to improving housing supply.
We are now close to eliminating the pre-1 November 2023 backlog of difficult and legacy applications. 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.
- Industry guidance documents
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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.