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.
In all the excitement about reaching the one millionth application milestone (did I mention that?) I haven’t had a chance to update you on some other developments in the Portal in the last couple of weeks.
We’ve recently been working with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to improve their own application processes. Read more…
At the risk of sounding unremittingly positive I can report that our traffic figures for January were by some margin the best month we’ve ever had.
There were 898,020 visits, an increase of 23.6% from January 2011 and 70,000 more than our previous best month.
We were also just shy of 9 million page views, a 300,000 increase on the previous best.
Additionally there were 170,566 downloads of the Building Regulations Approved Documents, an increase of 20.5% on January 2011.
Finally, we also believe that we’ve passed our March 2012 target of 60% of planning applications online, but we’ll need to wait for the next quarter PS1 results to confirm it.
All in all, not a bad start to 2012 our 10th anniversary year.
On Friday, 19th of February at 4.07 o’clock our one millionth online planning application was submitted by a member of the public to Hinckley & Bosworth.
When we launched the Portal we had no idea whether the concept would work but we had a great passion to improve the planning process. Ten years on I believe we’ve made a positive impact.
Many of the original Portal team are still here and while some have moved on all have contributed enormously along the way.
We have always tried to work collaboratively with industry, Government and citizens and held the difficult ground between all three against a shifting political and economic landscape.
I would like to thank everyone that has contributed to this success, from LPAs to agents, architects and housebuilders, home improvers and plansmiths, colleagues, partners and friends.
Particular mention should be made of Graham Saunders who had the original idea for the Portal while at the Planning Inspectorate and to Richard Goodwin who as the Portal’s first director did much to establish the ethos and culture that enabled the team to flourish from the beginning.
Many LPAs helped and supported us along the way but I’d like to say a special thank you to Neil Coleman and Huntingdonshire District Council who were the first to sign up and to Martin Howell and Wandsworth who gave us invaluable help and support.
Here’s to the next million, which we anticipate will take less than three years.
Finally, a round up of the statistics. One million online planning applications has:
* Saved UK businesses and local authorities in the region of £285m
* Saved 32,000,000 pieces of paper (64,000 reams)
* Saved more than 8,000 tonnes of CO2
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