I’m pleased to be able to let you know about a brand new service on the Portal and a new kind of collaboration between the Portal and its partners.
As you know, we’ve been in the business of developing useful tools for the planning system for some time.
The interactive guides, volume calculators, fee calculators and carbon calculators (to name a few) have all proved popular with users and there’s always a clamour for more.
Last year Portal applicants saved more than 8,000 tonees of CO2 by submitting their applications online.
The same as 40,000 trees could absorb in their lifetimes.
Following several comments decrying our decision to reduce the size and cost of our archive, I feel it is necessary to explain exactly what we are planning to do, and why this has no impact on anyone other than the original applicant. Read more…
Update: We have now completed this and all the CIL forms are now ‘fillable’ and can be accessed from this page.
Following several requests, we are in the process of amending the Community Infrastructure Levy PDF forms to let users fill, save and upload the electronic form as part of their online planning application.
The ‘Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) – Determining whether a Development may be CIL Liable’ form has now been published.
The other six CIL forms will be amended and uploaded shortly – we’re aiming to get these done within the next two weeks. I’ll keep you updated on timelines.
First, let me say that you have no idea how much self-restraint it took, to not head up this post with a tree- or sign-related pun, there are so many to choose from.
What follows is a pun-free note on how two respected trade associations have helped us drive online take-up in their respective industries for the benefit of their members and the environment. Read more…
I wrote to you recently about our decision to archive supporting documents on planning applications submitted more than five years ago. We’re going a step further with this in late July.
Over 1,000 applications are submitted to the Planning Portal every working day – this puts significant strain on our system storage.
If our system storage reaches capacity, and we don’t free up space, it will not be possible for new applications to be submitted to local planning authorities via the Portal. Read more…
The 1APP changes which went live last week have bedded in nicely. Users are reporting improved productivity and our service desk is reporting very few issues.
Most of the communications last week focussed on the changes to the Supporting Documents process but we also introduced some improvements just for LPAs. Read more…
If you love Lego too you should be here
This is not a spurious post! it is planning related honestly (well architecture anyway) and is part of RIBA’s Love Architecture Festival.
I do think that all future Lego housebuilding sets should be accompanied by links to the online Lego planning system though.
From the middle of next week (Wednesday 20th June) we will start to remove supporting documents from applications that were created more than five years ago.
The applications themselves will remain on the Portal – it’s just the supporting documents that are being removed.
The weight of well over a million applications submitted over the years has put a real strain on our storage capacity so we need to make room for the next million.
If you need to save any supporting documents on applications older than five years, please take a moment to log in and retrieve them between now and next Wednesday.
Just 10 million page views in May that’s all!
Averaging 325,000 page views, from 30,ooo+ visitors every day.
Planning Portal Blog 