Thanks to you all for hanging with us in 2011/12.
There’s no doubting it was another challenging year, however the partnership between ourselves, LPAs and system users of all kinds has once again made positive steps forward.
In 2011/12
- The Planning Portal delivered savings to the U.K economy of more than £114m
- Saw £24 of cashable benefit returned for every £1 invested in the service
- Enabled 2,300 tonnes of CO2 to be saved
- Increased online submissions by 20%, to 62% of all planning applications
- Processed 288,555 online planning applications and around 70% of planning appeals
- Received 400,000 visitors to the website per month, averaging 27,000 visits per day
- 100m pages of content were viewed
- 1.7m Approved Documents were downloaded
And finished the year off with hopefully significant improvements to 1App.
Please let me know if we helped your business or LPA in any way not mentioned above and good wishes for another record breaking year.
We have noticed that this post is still very popular with our readers, so it has been updated to better reflect the changes we have made to our system, notably the upload limit increase from 5MB to 10MB.
You can find the updated post here: https://blog.planningportal.co.uk/2019/11/27/three-tips-for-working-with-the-10mb-attachment-limit/
Thanks to you all for your fantastic feedback yesterday, it’s greatly appreciated by the team.
Contrary to some opinions we really want to improve the service we offer but like everyone else we have to scramble for resources.
Thanks also for the suggestions for further improvements. If they are not already on our list we’ll make sure they are added.
Very many of you find the problem of restricted file sizes particularly troublesome. The limits apply for valid reasons including issues of onward publication and consultation. Rest assured we will do all we can to help and we’re beginning by talking with LPAs again about the issue.
In the meantime I’ll be publishing a list of tips and tricks shortly to help you manage the problem and offer up other ways of improving your experience of the Portal.
Just a short update to let you know about a small but important change which went live late last week.
The site address for all applications used to be displayed in upper case on forms. We’d been told by many LPAs that this looked untidy when included in standard letters. Some LPAs even went as far as to edit and retype the site address in their correspondence.
Last week I blogged about the benefits the 1APP improvements project will deliver to LPAs. This week, I’d like to address how the improvements will help applicants.
We’ve known for a long time that attaching the multiple documents required to support online planning applications on the Portal can be a time-consuming and repetitive process, particularly for larger or more complex submissions. Read more…
Application validation is a subject close to all our hearts. Bristol City Council is the latest LPA to launch an agent accreditation scheme to try and improve the validation process for planning applications.
According to Bristol City Council, the scheme works on the basis of accrediting planning agents who agree to follow a ‘code of practice’ when submitting planning applications.
The code of practice contains a checklist of items, which the council regards as essential to the efficient processing of applications. Read more…
This is the first of two posts I’ll be publishing over the next week to look at the key 1APP improvements we’re introducing over the next month or so.
This post will largely focus on benefits from the perspective of LPAs. Next week, I’ll follow up with a post for professional applicants, so stay tuned.
This is quite a long post so please bear with me… Read more…
More news on the full extent of the 1App upgrade when I return next week.
If you are taking a break I hope you enjoy it.
All my best.
Chris
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…
