This week DCLG migrated its website on to the new and shiny Government portal Gov.uk. DCLG was one of the first Government departments to do this, others will follow in the next five months or so.
As with all mass migrations of web content you get the odd glitch and as a result some of links from the Portal to DCLG content have broken.
We’re fixing these now and will be providing Gov.uk with a list of non-working links. Read more…
Whether you are an architect, builder or planner on a site visit, you’ll recognise the face-numbing pain of a cold wind blowing through the site. Well suffer no more. Here’s a stylish and effective way of protecting your fine features against all Mother Nature can throw at you.
During the summer we made a number of improvements to 1APP. One of these was a new service for local authorities to let them manage the payment options they support for online applications on the Portal.
Since its introduction we’ve noticed that a number of LPAs have not yet specified a postal address for cheque payments.
As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, this is essential to make sure our customers who choose this method can send payment ASAP to avoid any delays with registration and validation.
We’re also aware that many LPAs can now support telephone and other payments – these details can also be configured by you on the Portal.
We recommend checking whether your LPA supports this payment method. If it does you can update the Portal with the appropriate details.
A guide on how to access and configure your details is available here.
DCLG has written to Chief Planning Officers today to announce that there will be a 15% increase to planning application fees in England commencing on 22nd November 2012.
This will apply to all applications.
We are currently making the changes to the Portal fee calculator to be ready for the change.
In Wales, existing fees will apply.
DCLG has released a PDF of the letter sent to LPAs covering the fee increase. You can download it here.
A government-backed competition will offer grants totalling £7m to boost research and development of the innovative 3D printing manufacturing process including the development of concrete building components.
And you thought my earlier post was a joke, ha!
The RIBA has just announced that it is partnering with us to promote our Smarter Planning initiative to architects.
If you’d like to know more about their take on this please read their practice bulletin or if you’d like more information from us see my earlier post or visit the Smarter Planning pages on the Portal.
In the last week or so more than 200 businesses and Local Authorities have registered their interest in the scheme.
Just occured to me are LPAs attaching QR codes to lamp posts or the front of buildings?
Amazing, fantastic and marvellous, were just some of the reactions (admittedly from me) when Dan our stat man gave me the latest good news on the web traffic and applications front.
For the very first time we topped over 1 Million visits to the website in one month (1,006,554 to be precise) thats 24% up on October last year, and a 16% increase on the last 6 months as an average.
Page views were 9,329,975 an 8.8% increase from 2011 and Unique Visitors were 435,706 [25.4% increase from 2011]
Planning Application numbers were also very healthy at 25,930 online apps which equates to around 63.2% online
Planning Portal Blog 
