Happy Christmas – Planning Portal reflects on 2023

It’s been a year packed full of crucial developments for the Planning Portal. We’ve achieved so many of our key goals and hit important milestones, both for our service and for planning. 

Over the past twelve months we’ve strengthened our position as facilitators of change within the built environment sector – providing users with key guidance on a range of crucial industry topics through partnerships with organisations such as Environment Agency, National Contaminated Land Officers Group, and Health and Safety Executive. 

In November of this year, we also hosted the second National Planning Conference in collaboration with the Royal Town Planning Institute. This event was a huge success and truly unique, bringing together key figures from across our industries to network and share their thoughts on the most pertinent topics affecting the sectors today. We welcomed speakers from across the globe to craft dynamic narratives on topics ranging from sustainable development to youth engagement in planning, in both panel and keynote sessions which spanned two incredible days. 

This year we also introduced the long-anticipated Location Plan Feature to our application service. After identifying location plans as a common cause for applications being deemed invalid, we added a simple-to-use feature allowing users to draw site boundaries as part of our online application process. Previously, this site-boundary documentation needed to be purchased separately and uploaded to applications – but adding this handy feature to our online application service has already helped reduce the number of invalid applications and reduced the workload on Local Authorities significantly. It also better follows the direction that planning reform encourages us to take – towards the use of data, rather than documents.

We’d like to extend warm holiday wishes to all the customers and our partners who have supported us and used our service throughout 2023. We have more exciting improvements coming in 2024 and look forward to continuing to work with you into next year and beyond.