Western Australia’s smallest council has 617 homes on just over a square kilometre. Its draft strategy models 1,242 more. The reason it exists matters as much as the number.

On 25 August 2026, the Shire of Peppermint Grove voted five to one to prepare a preliminary draft local planning strategy built around a scenario of up to 1,242 additional dwellings. The council that took that decision presides over 617 existing homes across 1.068 square kilometres, on an average lot of 1,306 square metres.

An amendment that would have softened the Shire’s stance, swapping the words advocate and promote for present and explain, lapsed for want of a seconder.

Read as a headline, it is a curiosity. One of Perth’s most expensive riverside suburbs agrees to roughly triple its housing. Read as a document, it is something more useful: a worked example of what happens to a council’s own position when a state government takes the zoning decision off the table.

The Shire’s number nearly doubled in under a year

The Shire has carried an infill obligation since 2018. The Central Sub-regional Planning Framework set it at 480 additional dwellings by 2050, 280 of those by 2031. The draft records a current shortfall of 118 against that target, a 2016 to 2021 goal of 70 dwellings that was not met, and 56 subdivision applications between 2017 and 2024 that produced 26 new lots. The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage has told the Shire that 480 is a bare minimum expectation.

In 2025 the Shire President briefed the Minister for Planning on what the strategy calls a moderate growth position. That position was 756 dwellings at a 70 per cent take up rate, described in the draft as a 123 per cent increase on current stock.

Then the State moved. Improvement Plan No. 65 took effect on 28 July 2026, on publication in the Government Gazette. By August, the same council’s preferred scenario had become 1,242 dwellings.

Nothing about Peppermint Grove changed in those months. The land is the same, the market is the same, the tree canopy is the same. What changed was who would be setting the density if the Shire did not put a number forward first.

Nothing about Peppermint Grove changed in those months. What changed was who would be setting the density if the Shire did not put a number forward first.

What the plan actually proposes

The draft models three growth transitions, each scaled by an assumed take up rate. Council backed the one labelled Option B. At a 70 per cent take up rate, and including 205 dwellings from the draft Cottesloe Village Precinct Structure Plan, it returns 1,242 dwellings. The other two scenarios on the table returned 1,046 and 1,392.

The redevelopment pool behind Option B is 379 existing dwellings across 30 hectares, which at 70 per cent take up yields 1,037 dwellings before the precinct structure plan is added.

The mapped settings behind that scenario are specific. Along Stirling Highway and through the Cottesloe district centre, the draft shows R-AC0 at up to 16 storeys and R160 at six or more. Behind that sits a transition band running R60 at four or more storeys, R40 at three, and R30 at two.

None of this is approved. The council resolved only to prepare a preliminary draft under clause 11 of the Planning and Development (Local Planning Schemes) Regulations 2015, to run facilitated community workshops, and to advocate Option B. Certification and consent to advertise still rest with the Western Australian Planning Commission. Nothing decided in August changes what can be built in Peppermint Grove today.

A dwelling yield is capacity, not a pipeline

This is the part that travels to any jurisdiction.

A yield figure in a local planning strategy is theoretical capacity multiplied by an assumed take up rate across a ten to fifteen year horizon. It is not a construction forecast and it commits nobody to build anything. The Shire’s own take up assumptions make that plain: 90 per cent for sites that are not heritage listed with dual frontages and laneway access, 45 per cent for heritage listed sites on battleaxe frontages.

The activity data shows the gap. Across the five financial years to 2025/26 the Shire determined 158 development applications and 239 building applications, with approved development valued at just over $309 million. In 2025/26 it determined 25 development applications, with approved value of $15.6 million.

Spread 1,242 dwellings across fifteen years and the implied rate is roughly 83 a year, in a shire currently approving a few dozen applications annually. Whether the framework permits that volume and whether the market delivers it are entirely separate questions.

The State already holds the zoning pen for eight precincts

Improvement Plan No. 65 covers eight of the ten priority station precincts identified under the Precincts WA program: Bassendean, Carlisle and Oats Street, Claisebrook, Cottesloe, Glendalough, Morley, Mosman Park and Swanbourne. Ballajura and Redcliffe are progressing separately. Cottesloe and Mosman Park bracket Peppermint Grove on either side.

The improvement plan itself does not set zoning, height or development standards. The improvement scheme that follows it does.

What is an improvement scheme?

An improvement scheme is a statutory planning instrument made under Part 8 of the Planning and Development Act 2005. It zones and reserves land and sets development control provisions in the same way a local planning scheme does. While in effect it replaces the region and local planning schemes across the scheme area, and the Western Australian Planning Commission becomes the responsible planning authority, although it may delegate some of those powers back to local government.

The Shire’s report records that on 11 August 2026 the Commission advised it had resolved to prepare that scheme, that advertising is expected later this year for 90 days, and that once approved it will replace the Metropolitan Region Scheme and amend the Shire’s Local Planning Scheme No. 4. The gazettal notice sits on the State register of improvement plans and schemes.

That 90 day window is the substantive consultation point for anyone holding land or carrying a project in the eight precincts. The Shire is explicit that it wants Option B settled beforehand, so it arrives with a negotiated position rather than a reaction.

The trade the council is proposing

Alongside the growth scenario, the council resolved to advocate a special control area running from the laneway west of View Street to the Freshwater Bay foreshore, sitting outside the frame of the improvement scheme area.

Inside it, the Shire wants to keep the controls currently applying in its lowest density zones: plot ratio, building heights, street setbacks, side and rear setbacks, single crossovers, minimum lot sizes and tree canopy.

Stated plainly, that is a council accepting substantial uplift along a transit corridor and around a district centre in order to defend a protected low density core. Other councils facing state led precinct schemes now have a worked example of how to concede yield in one place to hold built form in another.

Where the draft contradicts itself

The document is labelled preliminary, and in places it reads that way.

Part 1 puts the Option B uplift at 202.5 per cent. Part 2 puts the same scenario at 201 per cent. The arithmetic explains the split: 1,242 against 617 dwellings is 201.3 per cent, while 1,242 against the 613 private dwellings figure also cited in the draft is 202.6 per cent. Existing stock appears as 617 in the yield table and roughly 605 in a later table. The special control area is described as retaining R10 and R15 in the council resolution and R10 and R12.5 on the Option B map.

The Shire also states that in July 2026 the Minister declared that from 2027 all new or amending local planning schemes must carry an R30 base residential coding. That item does not appear in the State’s published media statement of 2 July 2026 on the Residential Design Codes review, though that statement did confirm the largest overhaul of the Residential Design Codes in three decades, including dropping the subdivision threshold for land coded R20 and below from 900 to 700 square metres. Consultation was flagged for later in 2026, with implementation expected from mid 2027.

None of that changes the direction of travel. It does mean the figures now circulating should be treated as indicative until a final draft is certified.

What changes for builders working Perth infill

Three things carry across.

First, inside the eight precincts the density that governs feasibility will be set by a state improvement scheme rather than a local one. Due diligence now has to track two frameworks at once, and only one of them belongs to the council you lodge with.

Second, the product implied by these settings is medium density. Transition bands running R30 to R80 are townhouse, terrace and low rise apartment territory, and the economics of those projects turn heavily on servicing costs on infill apartment projects rather than on build rate alone.

For a business whose systems, supply chain and supervision model are built around detached delivery, that is a question about building capacity across more than one product type, not a volume increase in existing work.

Third, the State has been open that Perth is missing its infill target. The health check released alongside the July code reforms put the annual urban infill rate at 39 per cent in 2024, up from 34 per cent in 2023, against a 47 per cent target.

Peppermint Grove, with 617 dwellings, is a rounding error against that gap. What makes it worth reading is the sequence, not the yield. The same sequence is now running in seven other precincts, and the pattern it sets will show up in how national housing supply is actually tracking well beyond Western Australia.

THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE

Headline dwelling numbers out of local planning strategies are capacity figures, not order books. They describe what a framework will permit, not what will get built. Anyone using them to size a land pipeline is reading the wrong document.

The signal here is procedural. Western Australia has shifted zoning authority for eight station precincts to the State, and councils are now pre negotiating yield ahead of the advertising window rather than reacting after it. For anyone holding land in those catchments, the 90 day consultation period expected later this year will do more to move feasibility than any council resolution.

Frequently asked questions

Last updated 11 September 2026. This article will be revised when the draft Station Precincts Improvement Scheme is advertised for public comment.

General information only. This article summarises publicly available planning documents and government material as at the date of publication. It does not take account of any particular site, project or commercial circumstance, and it is not legal, financial or planning advice. The planning instruments referred to are in draft or preliminary form and may change. Readers should refer to the primary documents and seek their own professional guidance before acting.

Author: TGB Editorial