We may not know who will be sitting where in Parliament and we may not know who will be King or Queen of the jungle, but there’s one thing we can be sure of – next year will be tough.
I’m fairly sure most of you will agree that there will be a lot to achieve and less money to do it with. I’m equally sure that we will not be immune.
Fortunately, through incredibly insightful management, we’ve already reduced our I.T costs and become greener with it. However, if we are to continue delivering to the level we’ve become accustomed, we expect we’ll need to top up the kitty.
At the moment, we raise funds in two ways: firstly, by delivering services for other bits of Government – good work but not a lot of profit in it! Secondly, we sell site location maps to planning applicants. This provides useful revenue either directly or by commissions from other suppliers with every penny going back into service development, however, we’d like more.
We have some ideas, but before sharing them with the world, I thought I’d ask you dear readers for your views.
The question is a simple one: what do you think the Portal could and should do to generate revenue?
If we get some good ideas, I’ll pop them in a poll and let you vote on them.
Over to you.
Chris
You may be aware that most Government websites are required to shift citizen-facing content to Directgov by March 2011. The idea being to make it easier for citizens to find Government content and to reduce the mountain of .Gov websites cluttering up the web.
Up ’til now we’ve struggled to understand how we might meet this obligation while retaining our ability to continue to drive reform of the planning system. This has caused no little tension.
That was then… Read more…
The latest in our ongoing series of mini-guides has just been added to the site.
This guide illustrates the basics of permitted development for extensions and complements the guides for porches and loft conversions as well as the Interactive House and Terrace.
The common approach for all of these guides is to attempt to present permitted development to the lay-person in a simple yet effective manner.
We are delighted when LPAs and others choose to link to the guides and we update them as legislation changes.
We’d be delighted to hear how we might improve any of these guides or receive feedback of any kind.
Today the Portal is pleased to announce the launch of the visual guide to loft conversions. It has nine slides to reflect the increased number of limits and conditions compared to porches. You can see the final version of the new product here.
Key Features
- Graphical representation of common projects affected by new PD rules
- Text and visuals showing limits and proximities
- Clear summary checklist at the end
- Printable PDF summary documents for users and LPAs
Watch this space for further new visual guides from the Planning Portal content team.
MasterMap Update
At the start of October, we updated the 1:1250 map data, which contains buildings, roads, water, etc, to the current version.
PDF Fees Summary
Responding to LPA requests we have also recently delivered the PDF fees summary – a document that sets out how applicants calculated their application fee.
And finally, If you’d like to keep an eye on our performance, you’ll need to read our Service Report (below).
Service Report
The Service Report, which is published on the Planning Portal, contains monthly, quarterly and annual statistics and information on performance and customer satisfaction. Read more…
I’ve added a feed to the left hand column that will aggregate content updates from the CLG site.
The feed includes articles from the “consultation”, “articles” and “what’s new” feeds.
Let me know if it’s useful.
Chris
On Thursday 1st October, CLG introduced two new application forms:
- Application for a new planning permission to replace an extant planning permission, in order to extend the time limit for implementation. Application for replacement of associated listed building and/or conservation area consents in order to extend the time limit for implementation. Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990.
- Application for a non-material amendment following a grant of planning permission. Town and Country Planning Act 1990
Steve Quartermain, CLG’s Chief Planner has issued a letter which contains information and and answers to FAQs. Read more…
We have recently published the first in a series of guides to planning for the most popular householder building projects.
The guides provide easy to understand, visual walk-throughs of the permitted development limits and conditions for common projects such as porches, extensions and loft conversions.
The guides support Killian Pretty Review recommendations and aim to help citizens understand the regent changes to the permitted development regime.
You can access the guidance on porches, a guide to extensions will follow soon.
Hurrah we’re live, if everything looks and works the same as it did on Friday we’ve been successful.
The idea of this stage of our biggest I.T change since we launched in 2002 was not to rock your world but to stabilise ours.
Many months of work between the Portal team and our technical partners IBM, Adobe and others has delivered a new technical infrastructure (Hardware and Software platform) and hosting environment for the Portal.
The service embraces newer, greener, technologies to deliver scalable and resilient services that will provide greater flexibility to meet future opportunities in support of the e-Planning agenda and futures changes and upgrades to Portal services. We anticipate saving more than 30% on power consumption alone.
The new service also paves the way for application software upgrades and enhanced content management tools to improve the presentation of information to Portal users.
The countdown to Portal 2.0 begins now….
Thanks to everybody involved.
Chris
If you want to know all the techie stuff Read more…
Planning Portal Blog 