The e-Consultation Hub, recommended for national adoption by the Killian Pretty Review, was formally launched in autumn 2008 by the Planning Portal on behalf of CLG. Expected to help drive and enhance the Government’s modernisation agenda, the Hub has been introduced to provide all of the national stakeholders in the planning process with the capability to complete both their internal and external consultation online. Read more…
The Killian Pretty Review made a number of recommendations aimed at improving the planning process.
The Killian Pretty Review Final Report and the Government’s response can be found on the Planning Portal on this page.
The Portal, on behalf of CLG, has been asked to lead on a number of the recommendations under separate work streams. Read more…
IRP has provided the Portal with an opportunity to improve the way its products and communications are delivered. The changes will improve our customer experience and allow users to customise their experience depending on what areas of the Portal they use the most. These improvements are being delivered under the Portal 2.0 project.
The new site will feature a new, refreshed design and will offer much better levels of accessibility. It is being tested at five different stages to ensure compliance and ease of use.
Phase 1, the User Experience and Information Architecture for the new site was completed in June 09. The Portal is now working on phase 2, the development, testing and implementation of the website which is due to go live in the first quarter of 2010.
We will keep you updated as we move forward.
The Planning Portal is completely restructuring its technical bits that deliver the website services. We have called this the Infrastructure Refreshment Project (or IRP for short).The IRP will enable the Portal to exploit the capabilities of Web 2.0, providing enhancements to the full range of Portal services, stabilising the existing service and enabling a move towards a customisable service.
The new service is set to go live this weekend and the System and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is complete.
The delivery of this project has been carefully planned to ensure that the effect on Portal customers is minimal. The planning application service will not be available this weekend but access to the Reference Information will be available for most of the time.
This outage while data is moved to the new environment will be the only impact that most existing users will experience (fingers crossed!).
Now that the blog is well established our communications team have decided to jump on the bandwagon and use this channel to provide regular updates on all things Portal.
The aim of these updates are to let you know what the team is currently working on and to give you the opportunity to make your views heard.
The updates will provide up to the minute progress reports from teams and groups working within the portal on different projects and include information on events, technical enhancements and fixes.
We are working on a new theme for the blog to seperate the “news” from the “views” but until then you’ll need to read it all or risk missing the golden nuggests.
If you have any questions please post your comments under an update and the relevant team will receive your feedback
Thanks Chris and the Planning Portal team
Just a short post to clarify the position on e-Consultation connectors.
As Ocella have now proven the e-Consultation connector schema provided by the Portal to LPA ICT providers is perfectly workable, disproving any statements currently being made to the contrary.
I urge any LPAs who are considering connecting to the hub to contact me or your Portal account manager for assistance.
We at the Portal are doing our utmost to work with everyone involved in the planning system to support improvements for all. We know how tough it is at the moment both for LPAs working with limited and decreasing resources and for businesses seeking the most efficient ways of working.
I am always happy to engage in discussion and I’m happy to be told I’m wrong, but too much hard work has gone into this project for it to be mis-represented.
Chris
South Oxfordshire District Council has become the first LPA to go live with an integrated implementation of the e-Consultation Hub.
The integration was facilitated by Ocella, the first LPA IT provider to get a connector to market.
I’ll report back on progress but expect to see great news on efficiencies.
Chris
We’ve been busy beavering away on all fronts just lately including new forms to extend the time limit for existing planning permissions and non-material amendments.
Unfortunately, neither are available as fully interactive forms yet, but we’re working on it. In this case the policy is moving faster than the technology – who’d have thought it?
Chris
Just a quick note to welcome folks at the IPC to the planning space, not least because our team pulled together the website for them in quick time.
We’ll be working with the IPC to develop a fully featured site over the coming months.
Chris
Those of you in the know will remember that the standards were designed to underpin improvements in planning application processing by standardising elements of application information.
However, that was a while back and time moves on.
As a result we intend to facilitate a review of the standards with a view to finding out “Who is using them/How are they currently being used/If they are effective/Should they be updated and if so how?”
We plan to do this by:
1. Recruiting a review panel to agree a question set for an online survey (e.g LPAs or POS, PAS, Planning Aid, RTPI, CLG, Stat Cons)
2. Run online survey and concurrent discussion
3. Consult on review panel views of the findings
4. Publish and promote the findings as recommended standards
Chris
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