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.
Overnight this blog passed the milestone of 300,000 views.
I’d like to take a moment to thank readers, contributors and critics alike for continuing to use this channel to help us build a better service.
All my very best regards
Chris
And a bountiful harvest it was, with more than 33,000 planning applications processed.
This beats our previous record month by more than 1,400 applications!
Not bad for a month with two bank holidays.
We’ve just published the Notification of a Proposed Larger Home Extension as promised last week.
You will find it here. We’ve also created a guidance note.
It contains only those elements required by the Statutory Instrument and therefore should be acceptable to every local authority in England.
We are now working on the other notification types beginning with ‘change of use’ and we’ll be releasing them as we complete them over the next few weeks.
My thanks to all you who supplied forms for us to plagiarise including colleagues at East Devon and Hart DCs, Stoke-on-Trent City Council and to all those LPAs who have helped QA so far.
Update 4th June: We have hopefully resolved the issues some people were having viewing the notification PDF. This was to do with the way certain browsers preview PDFs. The PDF displays fine if you open it in a dedicated PDF viewer such as Adobe’s own Acrobat Reader.
If you want to complete the PDF you will need to download it to your computer, this can’t be done in the browser. You can download the PDF by right-clicking the link and choosing ‘download linked file’ (or similar wording based on your operating system). Alternatively there might be an option to download the file in the browser – again, depending on which one you use.
Last year the Government decided to go ahead with a proposal to merge the application form requirements for agricultural land declarations and ownership certificates. The new combined certificates will simplify the application form and reduce the number of invalid applications submitted on paper (by post) on the basis of a technicality.
We will be introducing the changes on the evening of Thursday 6 June (18:00 – 20:00).
Please read on as there are implications for anyone with applications in draft at that time. Read more…
UPDATE: Notification due for release Monday 3rd June.
We are now in the process of creating a ‘Notification of a proposed larger home extension’ to support the new permitted development regime.
The notification will be available for download from the Portal.
In order to get this up quickly we will be developing a simple downloadable PDF that captures the information set out in the statutory instrument.
Within the PDF we will provide links to
- our LPA finder to help find the correct contact details
- our Buy A Map service to make sure appropriate plans are provided
We intend to make this live as soon as possible.
This quick and simple solution will be followed by something more sophisticated as soon as we are able.
Over the next few weeks we have a couple of planned outages to deploy changes to 1APP and increase the capacity of the site.
We’ve picked the least busy times but I would still like to apologise for any inconvenience.
The imminent dates for site downtime are
- Saturday, 25th May 08:00 – 10:00 – to increase our database capacity to cope with the significant increase in traffic, applications submitted and general usage.
- Thursday, 6th June 18:00 – 20:00 – to deploy the changes to the 1App certificates. If you currently have an application in draft you’ll want to read that linked post in detail.
We’re also introducing some further improvements to 1APP in the coming months. I’m just waiting for a little more confidence on release dates before sharing details.
Watch this space…
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