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.
As you may know the legislation around validation of planning applications is changing on Tuesday 25 June. This only affects applications made to English authorities.
This is part of the Government’s commitment to streamline planning application requirements.
The NPPF states at paragraph 193:
“Local planning authorities should publish a list of their information requirements for applications, which should be proportionate to the nature and scale of development proposals and reviewed on a frequent basis. Local planning authorities should only request supporting information that is relevant, necessary and material to the application in question.”
This change in legislation lets applicants challenge LPAs on their local-level requirements.
The consultation on ‘improving the validation stage’ states:
“50. In reinstating this right of appeal, we want to make clear that, as before, appealing against non-determination should be the option of last resort, pursued after other negotiation options have been exhausted. As the National Planning Policy Framework makes clear, we encourage pre application engagement and front loading of the process which should minimise the risk of disagreements about information requirements emerging. If a point of concern is raised by the local authority regarding the information necessary to validate an application, we expect both parties to seek to address that concern through negotiation in the first instance.”
North Somerset Council was kind enough to share with us the process and flow chart it’s planning to use to implement the new validation rules.
The council has agreed to let me publish it on this blog in the hope that it is useful to other LPAs: North_Somerset_validation_flow_chart
Congratulations to everyone concerned with the successful bid to become European Green Capital 2015 beating Brussels, Glasgow and Ljubljana.
Yet another reason apart from being home to the Planning Portal that Bristol rocks.
Following the introduction of the Neighbour Consultation Scheme and changes to enable larger extensions we have now updated the information on the website and revised both our extensions miniguide and our conservatories miniguide.
Just a short post to let you know that the new ownership certificates have been successfully deployed to the live site.
You can learn more about the changes and what they mean for applicants in the original blog post.
Planning Portal Blog 