But the Greens-dominated Marrickville Council, which was slammed for neglecting its core business of roads, rates and rubbish, made the biggest improvement of any NSW council. It cut 22 days from the average DA processing time to bring it down to 74, the average for urban councils.

The Planning Minister, Brad Hazzard, today released the 2010-2011 planning report card, naming and shaming councils that drag their feet on development applications.

Joint Regional Planning Panels have significantly sped up processing times for projects worth more than $20 million, from 317 days in 2009-2010 to 253 days in 2010-2011, the Local Development Performance Monitoring report showed. The panels determined 303 major project development applications worth $3.77 billion.

Development activity in the state overall remained close to the 10-year low of 2008-2009, with just 66,109 DAs approved. But the total value of development in NSW was up 7 per cent to $19.9 billion in 2010-2011.

Mr Hazzard said ''this report backs our view that the piecemeal reforms made by Labor haven't worked and the planning system needs a complete overhaul''.

But the opposition spokeswoman for planning, Linda Burney, said the government's overhaul would mean giving ''the minister the power to rezone 43 wishlist sites developers have put forward and bypass the views of local councils and communities''.

In the Sydney region, $13.4 billion of development was approved in 2010-2011, over half the value of all development in NSW and up $1.5 billion on the previous year. Development activity was highest in the City of Sydney, Blacktown, Lake Macquarie and the Hills Shire.

While average determination times across the state held steady from the previous year (68 days compared with 67), there were just eight councils that took over 100 days on average to process a DA, down from 10.

The slowest Sydney councils were Leichhardt, Mosman, Botany Bay, North Sydney, Canterbury and Canada Bay.

Leichhardt was also the slowest Sydney council on commercial or retail DAs, with an average processing time of 115 days; Willoughby was fastest at 27 days.

Along with Marrickville, Sydney councils that significantly sped up decision making during the year were Bankstown, Fairfield and Warringah.

There was a big increase statewide in approvals for dual occupancy dwellings and granny flats, up 43 per cent from the previous year to 2159; and increased use of the fast-track complying development code system.

Developers who appealed council decisions to the Land and Environment Court won 43 per cent of the time, but only 24 per cent of projects were upheld without any changes.

The Greens MP and planning spokesman, David Shoebridge, said the figures overall reflected well on local government's performance. ''In the last two years councils have had to cope with rafts of new planning laws and constant changes in state regulation, yet they have kept their turnaround times steady.''

The government's review of the planning system has been extended to March 2.