The Welsh Government has confirmed that its statutory environmental adviser – Natural Resources Wales (NRW) – has signalled that the green issues surrounding plans for a £280m motor-racing circuit in Ebbw Vale don’t warrant its call-in for a public inquiry.
Last month members of Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council voted unanimously to approve the scheme, known as the Circuit of Wales.
A spokesman for the Welsh Government said it had received a letter from NRW indicating their view that the planning application need not be called in on issues within their remit.
“Officials will now consider the responses of other consultees and all other information before them and prepare advice for the minister on whether or not the application should be called in. This will be done as soon as possible.”
In a statement NRW’s Graham Hillier said: “We have always recognised the importance of this development for the local community. Equally, we would have failed in our statutory duties if we had not raised the concerns about the impact this proposed development could have on the environment.
“Following lengthy discussion with the developers, we have agreed how the potential impacts of this development could be mitigated and the scheme can progress.”
Roger Milne
16 August 2013
Please note that Portal news articles normally appear on the main site. They’ve been published on the blog due to a technical issue.
The folks at Lego who brought us the ‘Architecture’ series of models including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling water and numerous other notable buildings have now launched an amazing almost 3,000 piece version of the Sydney Opera House.
At the same time they have also brought out the Architecture Studio, a 1200 piece set that lets budding Zahas express themselves in white blocks.
That’s Xmas sorted then!
P.S I am not on commission and there is no commercial intention here. I just thought you’d be interested.
I’m delighted to report that the portal team have won funding from the Cabinet Office Mutuals support programme.
The funding will pay for consultancy support to help us identify a suitable bid partner and develop an employee led bid to run the service in the future.
Responses are invited from interested parties with the appropriate skills.
Enquiries about partnering with the Portal in a future Joint venture should be directed in the first instance to my colleague Anne Jefferies on 0117 372 6343 or anne.jefferies@communities.gsi.gov.uk
You may already know that DCLG has today announced that it is looking for alternative funding models for the Planning Portal. DCLG have made it clear that their preference is a partnership between the public and private sectors.
The team are really pleased with this announcement which we know will bring about the investment we need to continue to improve our service for our customers.
We particularly welcome Government’s recognition of the value which the Portal provides as a national standardised service, its commitment to retain a government stake in the future business and the option for potential partners to consider a mutualisation element within their bids.
You can be sure that whilst the process of agreeing a new model and selecting a partner is underway, we will continue to focus on business as usual, improving the online application service and tools.
The DCLG prospectus and press release is available here www.planningportal.gov.uk/prospectus. For further information on this please contact DCLG at planningportalfuture@communities.gsi.gov.uk
The Portal team intend to develop a bid as an employee-led mutual and if you would like to discuss partnering with us on this proposal, please contact me via Anne Jefferies on 0117 372 6343 or anne.jefferies@communities.gsi.gov.uk.
I look forward to continuing to work with you in the future and will keep you updated as things proceed.
Hopefully we have now resolved the hangover issues from yesterdays debacle and we’re now up and running, if not at lightning speed then at least at a manageable pace and this should improve as the day progresses.
The issue with online applications not being retrieved by LPA 1APP connectors is also fixed which means that applications should now be retrieved successfully and automaticaly populate local back-office systems.
Part of the issue today was simply the sheer volume of applications being submitted concurrently as folks sought to make up for the lost day.
Rest assured we are doing all we can to understand what went wrong and to work with our I.T providers to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I had anticipated a barrage of complaints but instead your patience and understanding shone through.
Thanks to you all
Chris
It’s now 5.15 we believe the site is now functional.
Our suppliers believe the source issue is resolved. We anticipate the portal being live again in 60minutes.
I can’t tell you how sorry I am for the inconvenience todays outage has undoubtably caused you.
Unfortunately this catastrophe has been entirely out of our hands and is a result of issues at our hosting company affecting a significant number of sites.
They are working to resolve this as soon as possible.
In the meantime i can do nothing but apologise.
Chris
Unfortunately, the Portal site is currently down – this is due to problems outside of the Portals control.
I’m sorry for any difficulties this has caused you. We are working as quickly as possible to resolve the problem and get it back up and running.
Chris
Just a quick post to confirm that some technical changes to consolidate Wiltshire Council on the Portal were successfully implemented last night.
It means the old 1APP entries for Wiltshire authorities on the Portal were removed (they were disbanded in 2009 to create a larger Wiltshire Unitary authority following a local government review) and replaced with a single Wiltshire Council authority entry.
This change also includes an update of all the contact information for the authority.
The change has meant Wiltshire Council no-longer has to manually retrieve online applications and re-key the information into its IT systems for registration and validation.
Applications will now populate the new back-office system to help the authority realise greater efficiency and resource savings.
I apologise for any inconvenience last night’s downtime caused you as we introduced the change.
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