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.
Thanks to you all for continuing to read and respond to my witterings.
There have now been more than 1,000 comments posted excluding my own, which is gratifying as it’s become aprimary communication channel for us.
I do take notice of all your suggestions most of which are added to our list of potential improvements. Being human I take great pleasure in the many positive things you have to say and sometimes umbrage at the negative. Either way though please keep it coming.
Chris
We went live with further 1APP improvements last night. Just a couple of simple changes – an entrée before the main course, if you will. Read more…
Yes, we’ll be 10 years old on Thursday, 31st May – the Portal went live on this day in 2002.
Remarkably, given the turbulence over the years, there are several members of the original project team still slaving away. I joined the party in December 2002, thinking I’d give the Public Sector a go for a while and here I stoically remain.
The original vision for the Portal went something like this:
“Our objectives are to improve the planning system and to create a ‘value adding’ portal business (that delivers services wanted and liked by customers, both public and private).”
I think we’ve just about achieved that, but I’ll let you guys be the ultimate judges and it would be wonderful to hear any of your feedback on our journey so far.
We’ve passed through PINS, ODPM and now DCLG in our time and gone from zero customers and traffic to more than 9 million page views and 25,000 planning applications a month.
Having launched in May 2002 we then had to wait until electronic signature legislation was passed in April 2003 for the first online planning application to be made. It was a simple standard form which was made available to any LPA that wished to offer an electronic option to their customers.
The service has never been mandatory, despite which by early 2006 every LPA was using the form.
The following years saw great progress with the number of users and applications growing steadily and awards being picked up with frankly embarrassing regularity, capped off by the Civil Service Public Value award in 2008/09.
Meanwhile, in 2008 1APP was launched, reducing the number of local variations of sets of application forms from several thousands to one, at a stroke. While not perfect I hope you’ll agree it has made a positive difference.
It’s clear that there is still somewhere to go to reach our internal vision for where we’d like the Portal to be but we are as committed now as we were back then to help wherever we can.
I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone that has helped us along the way, in particular Graham Saunders whose idea it was and Richard Goodwin, who as the first Director set the direction of travel for the Portal and more importantly had the great good sense to employ me.
In FY 2011/12 the Planning Portal processed planning applications with a total fee value of £104m, that’s almost £9M a month!
There were 111 companies who submitted planning applications with a total fee value of more than £100,000.
There were 1,755 planning applications with an individual fee of over £10,000, including 45 applications with fees £50,000+.
The two largest applications attracted a fee of more than £250,000 each.
And I’m still driving around in a beat-up old Landrover, something wrong here!
You’ll recall I promised that we’d follow up on the issue of file size limits.
You’ll no doubt be pleased to hear that we have now sent out a link to an online survey requesting feedback from the LPA planning and technical community.
We’ll close the survey in a week and we’ll share the feedback asap.
The Planning Portal’s interactive house has become available for sponsorship again after sponsorship by Encraft is coming to an end.
For those of you that have been waiting for it to become available you’ll know it is a great opportunity and reaches a unique audience via a trusted source of government information, typically at the early planning stage of a home improvement project. Read more…
Guidance on a number of non-planning consent regimes is now available on the Planning Portal. It’s part of us doing our bit to support the Government’s drive to simplify and streamline the development process as a result of the Penfold Review.
The review found that planning and other development consent regimes were managed by different parts of Government and finding consistent information on these regimes was difficult for end users and businesses. Read more…
Planning Portal Blog 