Welsh mergers
The Welsh Government has published a White Paper with its official response to the Williams report which recommended the country’s 22 local authorities should be reduced by around half as a result of mergers.
The Government has confirmed details of £2bn of funding to be provided to local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) across England for infrastructure and housing development under the Local Growth Deals scheme.
Proposals for more than 1,100 homes on three sites in Droitwich Spa and Pebworth in Worcestershire have been approved on appeal. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles agreed with the inspectors that the local planning authority could not demonstrate a five-year housing supply.
A man who ignored a planning enforcement notice and continued to sell and store vehicles on Green Belt land in west Yorkshire has been ordered to pay back nearly £225,000 under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
There has been an increase in the success rate for planning appeals since the introduction of the Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) two years ago with a particularly significant improvement for residential appeals determined after public inquiries, according to new research published by Turley Associates.
Asset manager Henderson Global Investors’ application for consent for a £160m redevelopment of the former Smithfield Market in London’s EC1 has been rejected by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles.
Welsh Environment Minister dismissed
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones has fired his Environment Minister Alun Davies and will not appoint a successor.
Davies was dismissed for putting pressure on civil servants for private information about opposition Assembly Members.
While not directly relevant to Portal business, I thought anyone involved in neighbourhood planning might be interested in this rather clever interactive tool.
Developed using open data, it has been recently launched by the good folks over at Boilerhouse Media as part of their Making A Difference with Data project.
The map shows where neighbourhood plans are in the process of being developed or are in place.
It also signposts help and advice for anyone considering developing a neighbourhood plan in their area and has a useful feed using the Twitter hashtag #neighbourhoodplanning.
Image copyright: The Living
One of the most popular posts on this blog last year was the one about Bosco Verticale, two towers in Milan containing an amount of living trees equal to 10,000sqm of forest.
Continuing the theme of greener building is a project from architects The Living for the courtyard of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The ‘Hy-Fi’ structure is 100 per cent organic material. The embedded video explains how the structure uses bricks made from fungus and agricultural by-products that combine tremendous strength and flexibility while being 100 per cent compostable.
Each brick can be made in five days from a mixture of microscopic fungus and corn stalks and husks.
We warned you back in March that we were getting close to 80 per cent of all applications being submitted online, well with the release of the quarterly planning application statistics by DCLG last week we can see that we have made it!
Over the quarter Jan-Mar 2014, a whopping 81.6 per cent of all planning applications submitted across England and Wales have been made online via the Planning Portal.
With the average over the financial year 2013/14 standing at just shy of 77 per cent, we’re on track to meet the long-term objective of an average of 80 per cent over 2014/15.
Well done the whole Portal team who have worked so hard on this for so long and in particular our frontline staff on the support desk and account managers who work closely with our customers – whether applicants, agents or LPAs – on a daily basis.
And of course many thanks to you, our customers for your support, passion and on occasion, your patience! As you can see from the graph below, applications overall are continuing to rise at a rate of knots. 
Planning Portal Blog 