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.
I’ve just learned that my team have nominated me for a Digital Leader award.
Whilst it’s is amazingly rewarding to be thought of in this way it’s clear to me that the accolade belongs to the entire Portal team and everyone who has worked hard to achieve the success we’ve had. Unfortunately the awards recognise individuals rather than teams.
They recognise individuals who have demonstrated a pioneering and sustainable approach to digital transformation across Local and Central Government and industry.
If you know of a digital evangelist in your organization or believe that the Portal team and I deserve recognition you can nominate at the awards site where nominations close on September 16th.
On the 24th July 2013 Wiltshire Council will integrate its new planning back-office system with the Portal’s online application service.
This effectively means that the current Wiltshire Council area offices on the Portal will be removed and replaced with a single Wiltshire Council authority.
This change has meant Wiltshire Council will no-longer have to manually retrieve online applications on receipt and re-key the information into their IT systems for registration and validation. This will help them realise greater efficiency and resource savings from working electronically and enable other planning processes to be streamlined. Read more…
I’m pleased to let you know that we have now published two further prior approval forms on the Planning Portal.
The two forms are:
Prior Approval of Proposed Change of Use to State Funded School
And the catchily titled:
Please note that there are no guidance notes associated with these forms.
This completes the development of the prior approval forms we committed to following the amendments to the General Permitted Development Order
We published the Larger Extensions notification on the 3 June and the Prior approval notice for Change of Use from Business to Residential on 20 June. Both prior approval forms have been made available as ‘fillable PDFs’.
As before, if you want to complete and save the form you’re best off doing so in a standalone PDF application (such as Adobe Reader) – filling it in the browser has mixed results, depending on your browser.
As with the previous forms, we have used the Statutory Instrument as the basis for the form.
Once again, we are grateful for the rapid responses from local planning authorities who offered to take part in the brief consultation process as well as our colleagues in DCLG policy.
The 200th planning professional achieved Smarter Planning Champion status earlier today.
The Smarter Planning scheme, launched in October 2012, is run by the Planning Portal in partnership with planning professionals and local planning authorities.
The scheme promotes the online submission, receipt and processing of planning applications that meet a set of best-practice guidelines.
Applying these guidelines to the end-to-end planning process helps LPAs process applications more efficiently leading to more timely and consistent planning decisions and improved levels of service for planning professionals.
Smarter Planning Champion status is awarded to participants who demonstrate their commitment by consistently applying the best practice guidelines of the scheme.
If you’re interested in becoming a Smarter Planning Champion you can learn more about the scheme on the Planning Portal and register your interest.
We’re happy to announce that a streamlining of the process of starting a planning application should be in place by the end of this evening (4 July). The update needs a site outage, which means the Portal will be down from 18:00 until midnight. Apologies for the inconvenience but I hope you agree the improvements are worth it.
The changes compress the process into fewer stages which I’ve outlined below…
The ‘Prior approval notice for Change of Use from Business to Residential’ available on the Planning Portal has been slightly amended:
This sentence has been added below the notice heading:
*Development is not permitted where the building is on Article 1(6a) land, is a Listed Building or Scheduled Ancient Monument, or is or forms part of a safety hazard area or military explosives storage area.
Two questions in section 4 ‘Description of the Proposed Development’ have also been re-ordered and slightly revised. The new questions are:
If the building was not in use immediately before 30th May 2013, when was it last in use?
What was the use of the building immediately before 30th May 2013 or the last use before that date?
The Change of Use from Business to Residential form is available here as a ‘fillable PDF’.
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I’m pleased to report that we have now created a prior approval notice for Change of Use from Business to Residential schemes. This is only for use with LPAs in England.
This comes hot on the heels of the Larger Extensions notification we published a couple of weeks ago.
The Change of Use from Business to Residential form is available here as a ‘fillable PDF’.
As before, if you want to complete and save the form you’re best off doing so in a standalone PDF application (such as Adobe Reader) – filling it in the browser has mixed results, depending on your browser.
Please note that there is no guidance note associated with this form.
As with the previous notification, we have used the Statutory Instrument as the basis for the form.
Again, we are grateful for the rapid response from local planning authorities who offered to take part in the brief consultation process.
The Portal PDF elves are now hard at work developing the remaining prior approval forms.
We published the Larger Extensions notification on 3 June.
Planning Portal Blog 