Anglian Home Improvements have become the first company to sponsor our ever popular Interactive House.
Anglian, who were the first national company to switch to submitting their planning applications solely online, have recognised the value of the House as a tool for reaching new customers.
The House receives around 45,000 visitors each month, who come for advice on all matters relating to household development and building regulations.
As I’ve previously mentioned, we need to generate a significant amount of revenue this year in order to contribute to our costs. This sponsorship is a great way of adding to our coffers whilst providing excellent value for money to Anglian.
I’ll be providing more detail on our longer-term commercial plans after the Chancellor announces the results of the Government Spending Review in October.
Until then, if you’d like to follow Anglian’s lead by sponsoring the house from October, or enquire about other advertising opportunities, please contact our sales team.
Chris
Today we switched off our mapping platform after 8 years of service providing the backbone for the delivery of interactive development plans and our buy-a-map service.
We did this for a number of reasons including
- Old-style development plans are mostly out of date.
- The platform cost as much to run as it was generating in revenue
- Other suppliers offer better products
So as of today we recommend you purchase your planning application maps from an accredited Portal supplier who will provide an OS and LPA compliant map at a very reasonable rate.
Chris
Despite all the doom and gloom records were broken once again;
There were 21,923 Online Applications sent via the Portal.
Our highest number ever! and an increase of 40.1% from July 2009.
Total Visits – 631,914 up 12.7% from July 2009
Unique Visitors – 329,548 up 11.7% from July 2009
Total Page Views – 8,203,987 up 27.0% from July 2009
and
Average Pages Viewed per Day – 264,349 a 27.2% increase from July 2009.
Is business picking up generally?
what do you think
Chris
Earlier this month, we decided to withdraw our mapping service from the Planning Portal.
You can read more about this decision in my 9 July post.
We are now planning to close the service in August 2010. While this decision means we will be withdrawing our own Buy-a-map service you will still be able to buy a map from one of our accredited partners, in fact we urge you to do so.
All our suppliers will continue to provide OS licensed maps of a high quality that meet your requirements and ease the processing of applications.
Maps can be bought through the online application service as normal, or from our Buy-a-map page.
If you previously bought a map from the Portal, this change means you will no longer be able to access your purchased maps from your site plan account.
However, if you used the map to support an online planning application, the map will still be linked to the application.
To access your map, simply identify the application and it will be available in the supporting documents section.
If you have any queries regarding these changes, please contact Portal Support.
I thought I’d lift the following written by one of our Account Managers Robin, in response to a recently posted comment regarding the process for paying Planning Application Fees to LPAs via the Portal.
Planning Authorities currently have the option to offer three payment options for planning applications that are submitted online via the Planning Portal; Read more…
You may have seen CLGs recent comms regarding the national plannning apllication stats for Jan – March 2010.
There were 120,360 planning applications recorded in LPAs PS1 returns.
During the same period there were 51,267 online applications made via the Portal.
This equates to 42.6% of all applications made; by contrast in the same period 1 year ago the percentage was just 30.4% (33,554)
Therefore in the past year online planning application submission has increased by 50%
In June there were 21,126 applications made through the Portal which equates to a 58.9% increase from June 2009 (13,291)
‘Web Convergence’ is one of our key projects for the year – but what is it?
In a nutshell, it is the project to ‘converge’ the Portal’s citizen-facing planning and building regulations content with Directgov, and business-related content with Businesslink (BL), by March 2011.
In the past convergence has been a scary thing – we always thought it meant shutting down parts or even all the Portal.
However, in the last year the scope of convergence has changed significantly and is now an opportunity for us to increase the reach of Portal content with members of the public.
Our first proposal for Directgov last October was a virtual version of the Portal but with the familiar Directgov orange branding.
However, more recently Directgov agreed to adopt a much simpler convergence solution, which will see the project using the interactive house as the gateway for citizen content on Directgov.
The aim is that citizens will access high-level planning information via Directgov and link back to the Portal for the detailed content and transactions.
To be absolutely clear: we won’t be removing any content from the Portal in fact we will be adding content from The Planning Inspectorate; who are meeting their convergence obligation by migrating their non-corporate content to us.
This ‘light touch’ approach will cost less, a key consideration in this climate, and most of the work will be able to be completed in-house at Directgov and here.
Meanwhile, Portal content will be enhanced on the Businesslink site. The publishing company Sweet & Maxwell will rewrite business-related guides for publishing on the Businesslink site, which the Portal reviews.
Following careful review we have decided to withdraw our interactive development plans and Local Development Framework (LDF) databases when we move to a redesigned website later this year.
Our original concept and objective was to host each LPA’s development plan on the Portal. However, the changing policy landscape has made it increasingly challenging to keep the information up to date and present a complete picture of an LPA’s local policy framework.
When the initial service was implemented, many LPAs published their plans on the Portal as it made sense from a technological and financial point of view – the Portal being a hub to host interactive development plans, reducing costs for each LPA to have done it themselves.
However, more recently many of the plans have become out of date, superseded by LDF documents. Some LPAs have also chosen to host plans on their own websites as mapping technology and publishing tools have become more readily available and cost effective. Read more…
Planning Portal Blog 
