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.
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…
Planning Portal Blog 