According to a blog post by the Government Digital Service (GDS) last year there’s still a gulf between the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.
The GDS reported that “there are around 9.2 million adults in the UK who have never used the internet; many of these are among the vulnerable and disadvantaged in our society”.
The Government is looking at how to deal with this through its ‘Assisted Digital’ programme and by ensuring that government services are ‘Digital by Default’.
At the Portal, we’re also interested in how ‘Assisted Digital’/’Digital by Default’ may change what we do and how.
We already have a target that 80 per cent of all planning applications should be submitted online by 2015.
I’m interested in views on how ‘assisted digital’ relates to the planning industry and the Portal, any examples of where its already working (in planning or elsewhere) and any ideas you may have for how the Portal might support this.
As always, please let me know your views by adding a comment below.
Last week I announced we will be introducing some key changes to the application service in the next couple of months (if you missed that you can catch up here).
However, I’m happy to tell you that before the main course we’re introducing a range of appetizers to further improve our application service. The first change went live last weekend, the other two will follow on 10th April. Read more…
I can confirm that the revised CIL form has been published and is available from the Portal.
The form and guidance both have a unique URLs to them. This ensures LPAs can easily reference them on their websites and in any other communications.
CIL additional information form
CIL additional information guidance
Thanks again to our good friends in Wandsworth for their help in coordinating this work and to all those that provided feedback to improve the form and guidance. Read more…
Are you sitting down? If not you may want to as I’m delighted to be able to tell you that we are, at long last, going to be making some significant improvements to the Portal’s online application service in the coming weeks.
While money is more than a little scarce at the moment we have found enough down the back of the Portal sofas to address some of the key issues you’ve been telling us about for some time.
The changes we’re making contain a handful of legislative-related changes, but in the main we’ve tried to focus on what our users want improved to make it quicker and easier to use.
So without further ado here are some of the key improvements:
Better process for adding supporting documents – according to feedback, one of the big bugbears with our service is the process for attaching supporting documents to an application. You’ve asked us to simplify it and make it less repetitive and that’s just what we’re doing.
Improving the submission process – we’re moving payment to the final part of the submission process, which you’ve told us will make the application process easier for agents, applicants and LPAs.
Simpler help and guidance – a key change for new users, we’re improving the presentation of the help and guidance text by putting the information in the context of the questions.
Improved forms – we’re making it easier to complete the forms by marking required fields with an asterisk. This means it will be easier to see – at a glance – what needs to be done.
UPDATE: This is not the complete list, we are attempting to squeeze in more improvements as money and time allows. We are constrained by only being able to include those changes that can be substantially completed on our test system by March 31st.
The additional changes we hope to add in include the ability to automatically repeat location and site address . More details will be blogged as we confirm the changes are to be made.
I’m aware this is only a start and believe me, there’s more we’d like to do to improve the service. Rest assured that we still have any feedback you’ve previously sent us and we’re always revisiting this to prioritise future improvements.
Applications submitted through the Portal now represent more than 60% of all applications in England and Wales. By the end of 2015 our target is to have 80% of applications submitted via our site. To achieve that we need a world-class application service and these improvements represent our ongoing commitment to meet that goal.
I’ll be blogging more in the coming weeks with some more information on how the changes will affect applicants and LPAs and, importantly, when we expect these improvements live on the site.
As ever, you can share your thoughts by adding a comment below.
There’s still time to register for our Planning for Growth event next Tuesday (20 March) at our DCLG’s head office in London. Over 100 planning professionals have registered so far, but there are still spaces if you would like to come along.
For those of you who missed my previous blog, here’s a refresher of the plan for the day.
The theme of the events is ‘Planning for Growth’ and focusses on how new ways of working (such as submitting your applications online) can help support the Government’s growth plans as well as save you time and money. The event will be of particular interest to planning professionals submitting applications.
Read more…
Now I’m not one to promote online piracy, but in this case I might make an exception.
The Daily Mail suggests that if you want to apply for planning permission to hoist the Jolly Roger you do so on the Portal.
Following my earlier post about the revision of the CIL additional information form, I’m happy to confirm that feedback was received from many LPAs and a revised form agreed and approved by an LPA focus group, led by Wandsworth Council, and DCLG policy colleagues.
The Portal team is now developing the revised form and aim to make this available later this month. The approved form questions and guidance are available for preview here: CIL additional information form
Once the revised form has been created (the linked PDF is just for informational purposes, the layout hasn’t been done yet), it will replace the existing form. Read more…
For the second month in a row the Portal has experienced record breaking usage figures.
In February we served up more than 9 million page views to 398,163 unique visitors, despite it being a shorter month.
The site received more than 30,000 visits a day, an increase of 34% on February 2011 and equating to 300,000 daily page impressions.
I’ll be holding my breath as March is generally the busiest month of the year – will the Portal hit the 10 million mark?
If you are in the business of planning and want to reach the widest range of new customers either B2B or citizen you should be talking to our commercial team.
We recently hosted a couple of free events in collaboration with RTPI, RICS, RIBA and CIAT which proved very popular. We have one more free event taking place on Tuesday 20 March at our Eland House in Victoria – in other words, DCLG’s HQ.
The theme of the events is ‘Planning for Growth’ and focuses on how new ways of working (such as submitting your applications online) can help support the Government’s growth plans as well as save you time and money. The event will be of particular interest to planning professionals. Read more…
The following group of local authorities have all averaged more than 60% of their planning applications online throughout quarters 1-3, 2011, 22 of them have averaged greater than 70%. A fantastic performance I hope you’ll agree.
Particular mention should go to Melton who have risen from 52.1% to 78.5% online and Stevenage from 43.6% to 68.8%.
| Ealing Council London Borough | 88.0% |
| Craven | 86.7% |
| Brecon Beacons NPA (Powys NP) | 85.5% |
| London Borough of Hackney | 85.4% |
| Hinckley and Bosworth | 84.1% |
| Hammersmith and Fulham London Borough | 81.7% |
| Oadby and Wigston | 80.1% |
| Coventry | 74.6% |
| Charnwood | 74.4% |
| Merton Council LB | 74.1% |
| Lambeth Council LB | 73.6% |
| Westminster City Council | 72.3% |
| Preston | 72.1% |
| Bristol UA | 71.8% |
| Bedford Borough Council | 71.6% |
| King’s Lynn and West Norfolk | 71.1% |
| Tower Hamlets LB | 71.1% |
| Stoke on Trent UA | 70.7% |
| Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea | 70.6% |
| Rutland UA | 70.5% |
| Derbyshire Dales | 70.4% |
| Camden Council | 70.3% |
| Hyndburn | 69.2% |
| Islington Council LB | 69.1% |
| East Riding of Yorkshire UA | 68.9% |
| Daventry | 67.1% |
| Redditch | 67.1% |
| Melton | 67.0% |
| Manchester | 66.9% |
| Lancaster | 66.7% |
| Rushmoor | 66.6% |
| Welwyn Hatfield | 66.4% |
| Haringey Council London Borough | 66.3% |
| Greenwich Council London Borough | 63.7% |
| Fenland | 63.6% |
| Salford | 63.3% |
| Newcastle-under-Lyme | 61.7% |
The data is not exact and should be taken as a close approximation using the most recently available PS1 returns.
In Quarter 3, 2011, 126 local authorities in England and Wales achieved this same milestone. I’ll be following up in the near future with features on some of these authorities and also on some of the individuals and teams that are making an impact.
Planning Portal Blog 