Open Digital Planning March 2025 Update

It's been a while since our last blog post, and there's a lot to catch up on.

We've had some changes in the team, and we're excited to announce that Alfie, a new member of the council's Digital Services team is now working with our Planning team to improve our current digital planning services and create new ones.

The success of find out if you need planning permission continues, and we have an exciting development to share. We've completed the project to identify all properties that have had their Permitted Development (PD) Rights removed.

This involved checking around 72,000 records and entering the relevant conditions. The spatial layer is near completion, and soon users will be able to see immediately if the PD rights have been removed.

We believe we are the first authority in the country to achieve this, which will enable us to provide an even better service online.

The report a planning breach service is now the sole method for reporting enforcement investigations. We've seen a significant rise in the use of this service, and as well as being able to complete this online customers can call the council's customer services team, who will complete it on their behalf. The document/photo upload feature is proving invaluable as it saves time, helping officers determine the breach.

Now for the exciting news...

We're about to launch a new service for planning pre-application advice. This service has been designed with our new pre-application structure and charging schedule and is currently being tested by officers. When we're happy it works as we expect we'll then be asking our group of volunteer residents to test it; you can join this group by applying to be part of our Community Panel here.

Our vision is for this to become the preferred method for submitting pre-applications to the council and it  includes all the features of other services, such as plotting a red line, uploading documents, with the added ability to pay using GOV.Pay a first for for our council.

There's even more good news, we're also working on a Submit a Planning Application service, a joint project between several local authorities and Open Digital Planning. This service will allow the submission of and payment for planning applications online and demonstrates our commitment to collaborative working access local planning authorities.

Do bookmark our Open Digital Planning Blog for more updates on this and other work.