2022: A round-up 

The Planning Portal Team would like to extend warm seasonal greetings to all our customers and service providers. It’s been a phenomenal year for us, filled with a range of key updates to our service as well as exciting developments for the planning and building industries overall. We’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on some of our key developments during 2022. 

At the start of this year, we saw the biggest change of the Planning Portal in recent years, the re-platforming of our planning application service. This optimised version was developed in-house by our talented colleagues TerraQuest Solutions. The new application service introduced a range of new functions and features, helping to keep the Planning Portal as user-friendly and modern as possible. This update also gave us the chance for a re-brand, giving a fresh feel for both the application service and our website overall. We’re very happy with how this transition worked and want to extend a huge thank-you to everyone involved in making this such a success and for your patience while the service settled down.

In May of this year, we added twelve Prior Approval forms to our application service. This update allowed us to cover all the Prior Approval requirements that have been introduced via amendments to permitted development legislation over the last couple of years. With this update, we also included additional changes which allowed us to integrate better legislative compliance into our service. 

In the summer, the special provisions which were put in place by government to classify certain developments – which were stripped of their permitted development status in July 2021 – as ‘protected developments’, came to an end. We updated our application service on 18 August to reflect these changes. 

Later in the year, we also improved the capacity of our supporting documents upload feature, allowing users to upload bigger files to support their applications. This change provided a more user-friendly method of selecting documents to add to or remove from applications, also allowing users to select multiple ‘types’ to classify the documents uploaded in support of applications. 

In addition to the changes noted above, we also made several other updates to improve the functionality and user-journey of our service, further details of which are noted in this blog post. 

Another huge milestone for us this year was the National Planning Conference 2022. We had the pleasure of hosting this event at the Birmingham Hilton Metropole, in collaboration with the RTPI. 

The conference was a huge success and a landmark event for the planning industry. Attendees listened to and participated in talks on the most cutting-edge ideas in the world of planning today.

This was our first in-person conference since the pandemic. It was very rewarding that the event attracted many of the industry’s leading thinkers and talent to share their experience and ideas. We also relished the opportunity to interact with our stakeholders face-to-face. Feedback on the event has been extremely positive and we want to say thank you to everybody who attended and was involved, including our amazing speakers and sponsors.

We continued to conduct high-level data research throughout 2022 to produce our monthly Market Insight Report. This research revealed a percentage drop in application numbers nationally when compared with application figures for 2021, which shows a cultural shift as people settle into a new work/life balance, reflecting the increase in working from home which the country has seen following the pandemic.

What’s next for Planning Portal? 

In 2023 we are ambitious to bring about even greater levels of efficiency in both our planning and building control application services. We want to assist agents and planning consultancies to realise the full benefits of working digitally using our new platform. We also have strategies in place to help Local Authorities maximise their use of our service with full advocacy of online applications and integration of our service.

One of our main projects of 2023 will be the re-platforming of our current building control application service on to the same platform as our planning application service, to allow for a joined-up, seamless submission process for all applications. Further details with regards to this will be available in the new year. 

We also plan to move from our current application data format and transfer methods to a more modern technical solution that allows for greater agile development and interoperability with LPAs to validate and process our application submissions. 

Our vision is to be able to improve the quality and quantity of data available to Local Planning Authorities and to also look to receive relevant data back to inform users of the progress of their applications including any onward actions that may be required.  

In line with government’s digital planning agenda, we have completed a discovery project to provide applicants with a facility to draw a digital red-line boundary on the Planning Portal so that they can submit site location plan polygons as part of their application. This can then be passed to existing Local Authority back-office systems. More information on this will follow in the new year. 

It has been quite a busy year for us and for the industry as a whole, and we look forward to further improvements in 2023. 

We know that not everyone stops for Christmas, so if you are planning to use the Planning Portal over the festive period, please note our Support Team’s availability in case you need to get in touch: 

Service Desk Christmas opening hours 

26 and 27 December – Closed 

28 to 30 December – 09:00 – 17:00 

2 January – Closed 

3 January – 09:00 – 17:00