When the decision is reviewable, the record is the defence
National departments, provincial competent authorities and regulators rarely lose reviews on the merits. They lose them on procedure. Section 6(2)(b) of the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act makes a missed mandatory step a ground of review on its own.
The answer is a record: who was notified, when, what they said, what was decided and what they were told about challenging it, produced in full on the day it is asked for.
Trusted by public bodies, utilities and infrastructure programmes in the UK and beyond
Who is this for?
National departments running notice, comment and authorisation processes:
- Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment
- Mineral and Petroleum Resources
- Water and Sanitation
- Electricity and Energy
- Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs
- Public Works and Infrastructure, with Infrastructure South Africa
- Transport
This also covers the nine provincial competent authorities that decide environmental authorisation applications. Their names change with each administration, so they're best held as a maintained lookup rather than typed into a free text field.
Regulators that run statutory notice, comment and hearings: NERSA under the Electricity Regulation Act, the National Nuclear Regulator under section 21 of its Act, the Transport Economic Regulator under the Economic Regulation of Transport Act, and the Information Regulator.
State owned enterprises carrying the same procedural duties in practice, whether or not they are organs of state for every purpose. Local government sits on its own page: municipalities and metros covers the Municipal Systems Act, the MFMA, and the IDP and budget cycle.
PAJA, and what a defensible record looks like
- Section 3 requires adequate notice of the nature and purpose of the proposed action, a reasonable opportunity to make representations, a clear statement of the action, and notice of review or appeal rights and of the right to reasons. Each of those is a record.
- Section 4 applies where the action affects the public. A public inquiry, a notice and comment procedure, both, or another fair procedure: whichever is chosen has to be followed. Choosing notice and comment and then running an inquiry-shaped process badly is the failure mode section 6(2)(b) catches.
- Section 5 gives a person 90 days to ask for written reasons and the administrator 90 days to give them. Reasons written eleven months after the fact, from an incomplete file, are how a department ends up conceding.
PAIA, and what a request actually reaches
Under the Promotion of Access to Information Act, a public body has 30 days to respond to a request, extendable by 30 days. Grounds of refusal include third-party privacy and confidential commercial information, and section 46 carries a public interest override.
The point departments underestimate is scope. Engagement records held by a public body are potentially requestable: attendance registers, minutes, comment logs, grievance files and internal notes about named individuals. A free text note written in frustration about a named objector is a record, and it may be one the requester is entitled to.
That makes field level classification a requirement rather than a refinement. Internal assessment should sit in a field that can be identified and weighed against the exemptions, not scattered through a general notes box that has to be redacted line by line against a deadline.
The register without consent
Consent is the wrong lawful basis for a statutory register and it collapses the first time an objector withdraws it. A statutory process rests on section 11(1)(c) of POPIA, a legal obligation, or section 11(1)(e), a public law duty. What does bite is the content: special personal information under sections 26 to 33 is prohibited by default and includes race or ethnic origin, political persuasion and trade union membership, all three of which South African engagement practice routinely records.
Implementation in four to six weeks
Four to six weeks on average from contract signed to launch, covering planning calls, system set-up, configuration, data import, checks and end-user training, with a minimum of 20 hours of onboarding and two 1.5-hour training sessions with a dedicated Client Success Manager. How long it actually takes depends as much on how quickly your data is supplied as on us.
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ISO 27001:2022, Cyber Essentials Plus and a UK G-Cloud listing. Hosted on Microsoft Azure with encryption at rest and in transit, independently penetration tested every year by a CREST-approved organisation, and a 99.95 per cent uptime guarantee with 24/7/365 monitoring.
Role-based permissions by project, module and record
Permissions are not all or nothing. A regional office sees its own province; a case officer sees the projects they are assigned to; and internal assessment sits in fields that can be restricted and identified, which is what makes a PAIA request answerable within 30 days without a line-by-line redaction exercise.
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