The Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA is lobbying the State Government to overhaul the way it handles environmental approvals for the mining industry, saying WA needs to be more competitive both nationally and internationally.

The CME is proposing a so-called single decision maker model, which would effectively rationalise the bulk of approvals into one process to be overseen by a single minister, advised by expert agencies.

The lobby group has proposed establishing an independent approval reform office, which would assist the director-general of Premier and Cabinet as the main regulatory reform champion in Government and work closely with the recently established regulatory gate-keeping unit in the Department of Treasury and Finance.

CME chief executive Reg Howard-Smith said despite some improvements the approvals process was still "the biggest issue" for many miners at the smaller end of town.

"What we're saying is you really need to take a much longer term view with approvals and not do it on an ad hoc department-to-department basis and look at it as a whole," he said.

"We're saying the best model is a single decision-maker model. If it happened that would be a major change."

The CME wrote to ministers last week outlining its concerns and preferred solutions. Although the Government is in the middle of implementing recommendations to have come out of previous reports, including a tracking system for applications, the CME's position is the proposed changes represent only a small part of the change recommended by those reports.

"Particularly with the smaller guys it is a major, major issue," Mr Howard-Smith said. "And then we look at what's happened internationally we say the sovereign risk in areas, a lot of African countries, is becoming less of an issue and approvals generally are pretty good . . . it's a competitive issue."