Updated: 1APP change summary
As regular readers of this blog will know, the last few months have seen a lot of activity around our application service with multiple improvements, fixes and changes.
With so many changes coming through I thought it might be helpful to put together a headline summary of the changes we have made over the last few months – and flag up some that are on the way.
April 2012
Auto-populating data
- Applicants able to populate applicant’s address with site address
Capitalisation fix
- Site address was previously being sent to LPAs in capitals, it’s now being passed through with correct case.
May 2012
Improved navigation and appearance of forms
- New ‘save and continue’ buttons and improved visual consistency
Visually marking mandatory fields
- All Mandatory fields marked with an asterisk
Inline help text
- Help text on the forms now appears on the same page, rather than on a separate page
June / July 2012
Supporting documents improvements
- Upload up to 10 documents at once
- Reduced number of questions about each document
- Reduced text on supporting documents page
- Improved error messages/notifications
- Incomplete icon for mandatory documents
- Merge documents
LPA admin improvements:
- Can manage their payment details
- They can change their payment info
- Can change which payments they accept
New archiving policy
New CIL form:
Forthcoming for 20th September 2012
- Improvements to pay and submit
- Payment moved to be part of the submission process
- More logical for applicants
- Reduction in calls to LPAs from applicants who have paid but had not realised they had not submitted
Planning Portal Blog 
Are you able to provide a N/A tick box on the materials section?
So you don’t have to open and edit every single existing and proposed text box and type “N/A”
It takes far too long to edit and save each one.
I agree this would be useful but you only need to do one material to make the page complete!!!!
This is true but we’ve had cases where the Council have requested confirmation later (even if N/A and referred to in the D&A) when they’ve been left blank on the forms.
Whilst all of the alterations to the 1APP form are greatly appreciated I am still not getting any responses to my suggestions that you could extend the acceptable drawing file formats to include DWF format. I believe that this format is far superior to Adobe and the software is available, free of charge, from Autodesk and produces files sizes which are a mere 10% of a usual Adobe PDF drawing file. AutoCAD users already have the software as part of their AutoCAD package. Please give serious consideration to this option.
I work for an LPA and provide advice to it. I would love CAD DWG (or even better georeferenced files I can import into GIS) rather than pdfs – it would save me time in reviewing applications. I have often wondered where the obstacle lay.
I agree the changes so far have been greatly rec’d. I deal with mostly residential applications, so when submitting a full application, i am presented with page after page of ‘commercial’ criteria that is not applicable. Can you not add a tick box on the first page that separates residential and commercial? it would save me loads of time and of course money !!
Hi Jason, we’d love to but unfortunately the question set is legislated and we’re not allowed to mess with it.
We have passed this back to our policy colleagues and hope we’ll be able to address it at some point in the future.
Try completing the form that is specifically for ‘Householder’ applications!! You have this option when you first open up a new application.