The project will combine the six legacy planning systems into one single software platform. 47 years of planning information has already been transferred to the new system for the former North and West District Councils.
The third stage will relocate the former Weymouth and Portland’s Borough Council’s information. The existing system will be taken offline in the evening of Sunday 21 March. Following testing to make sure that all the information has moved across successfully the system will be brought back online during next week. Exact timing will depend upon how well the data has moved across.
During this time there will be no access to planning applications for North and West Dorset and Weymouth and Portland. People wanting to comment on particular applications should either do this before Sunday or wait until the system is back online. Any deadlines that happen withing this period will be extended to reflect the number of days that it was offline.
Cllr David Walsh, Dorset Council Portfolio holder for planning said:
“This marks the halfway point of this important piece of work. Everyone is working hard to ensure that all the information is transferred and accessible for our customers to use.
“I ask that people bear with us where they have experienced a lack of functionality or delay caused by the outage that happens during transfer. I understand that this can be frustrating, but we are working to make the system better and more user-friendly.”
The new system, currently, has reduced functions until everything has been transferred. The Second part of the project will look at the transformation of the service, helping customers to find information and make it easier to use the planning system.
So far in this project Dorset Council has:
- Moved 285 employees onto the new system
- Continued to make about 100 application decisions made per week since March 2020
- Transferred 1.8 million documents including:
- 195,766 planning applications
- 274,937 building control applications
- 165,449 land charge applications
- 362 Tree Preservation orders
- 9,782 enforcement applications
- Updated and harmonised 350 templates
Still to come the transfer of information from:
Former East Dorset District Council
Former Purbeck District Council
Former Dorset County Council
To undertake this when the whole system was under huge pressure generated by the SDLT holiday and whilst staff were expected to work from home most of the time was nonsensical. If we’d had the choice we could not have selected a worse time with the consequential penalties for those current and potential Dorset residents being extreme. To have to wait 6 months for the results of a Local Authority search is unacceptable under any circumstances but even more so when it was self-imposed by Dorset Council.
Hi Andy – This project has not caused the back logs. These have been caused mainly by the unprecedented number of requests we’ve received because of the SDLT holiday (national) without a similar uplift in the number of staff to deal with these requests (local). The project team have worked incredibly hard into the evenings and weekends to ensure normal business is not affected too much. The fact that we’ve kept making around 100 decisions per week shows this. I understand that waiting for searches is frustrating and all being on the same system will make this work easier and quicker. Fiona
Please don’t tell me that you’re updating the completely useless planning site to something more horrendous. The current system is diabolical and it’s near enough impossible to find any information on it let alone backdated applications.
Eva – the plan is to make it more user friendly. We are aware of the issue with the current systems. The first part is to move all six former district, borough and county data into one fit for purpose system and then talk to our users to make it more customer friendly. Fiona
Fiona,
There was nothing wrong with the previous set up for planning. What a huge waste of tax payers money. Who makes these crazy decisions?
Eva – there were six different systems which didn’t interact with each other. Several of these systems were out of date, coming to the end of their contract or not supported anymore. We would have had to negotiate a new contract anyway so it made sense to bring everything into one system so that all the team could use one system with one data set etc. So rather than wasting money this will save money. Fiona.
Will you be extending the deadline for commenting on applications that are due over the next few days and re-advertising the dates. I’ve alerted people to an application that’s closing on the 29th March – anyone looking to comment will not be able to, which is unacceptable.
Hi Alistair – as stated in the article we will extend deadlines that are affected by the downtime of the system. Fiona
P/FUL/2020/00480
During a time when people are asked to stay indoors, Dorset Council deals with an application for this Angola site, a site that must have cost the council an inordinate amount of time and money, and although a planning notice is put on the site, I did not see a Public Notice in the press. Now Dorset Council have taken down before the closing date for submissions,29/03/2021, the planning portal for Comments about this current application for change of use of this site.
Dorset Council wrote to inform some local residents about this new application in a part of Bell Street and the High Street but did not write to residents who live a few metres next to this site until they were asked to do this. As many people especially older residents are complying with the law and staying at home, just exercising near their homes, many will not have seen the public notice on the site and like me not seen a notice in the press if there was one. From past comments, many residents living within hearing distance of this site and responding to the past retrospective applications for Angola76, live all the way along Bell Street, Barton Hill and Angel Lane; have they received a letter about this new application?
Particularly as I, the nearest resident was not informed in writing and as many local residents, am not walking around the town, I had ‘flyers’ just informing people of this current application put in letter boxes in all the houses in the streets mentioned above on Sunday 21/03/2021. I do realise I may be alerting supporters but feel it more unacceptable that anyone who has complained in the past about their life being impacted by the previous, closed Angola 76 nightclub business on this site, should not know of this current proposal which still has elements of this past business.
If anyone seeing this proposal from the information from this ‘flyer,’ who did not already know of this application, tried at that time to put in a comment, either ‘for’ but particularly ‘against,’ as those are the residents most likely to be affected by the proposed change of use, then found they could not submit their comment and it is quite possible that they may think as I did at first, that they could not now put in a comment. As you do not provide a date when the portal will be available again or an email address for comments to use in the interim, many will give up. This is totally unfair for ‘objectors ‘particularly as ‘no comments’ would indicate that the public are not concerned about the outcome.
I think that Dorset council has a duty to put in place some action to rectify this situation.
Please tell me what intentions you have if any, to let residents near this site, especially those who by past objections have shown they are concerned and who may be now be left out of this planning process by not being informed or may now think when going to your planning portal site that they are too late to make a submission and not try again.
Hi Anne – As I have previously stated we will be extending deadlines to applications that are affected by this downtime. I’m sure you appreciated the massive job this is – please see the list of applications that we have already transferred. But it will be worth it to have all our planning team working on the same system, we can then make this a more customer friendly service. Fiona
How long an extension? Chideock Parish Council has 3 applications requiring comment by 25 March.
Sal – we will extend for the number of days that the system was offline. Fiona
I am currently attempting to research the sequence of Planning decisions for the Redrow development at Littledown, Shaftesbury as context for commenting on/objecting to their current Application P/FUL/2021/00026.
Please confirm when I can conduct this on your system & that any deadline for comment/objections will be extended accordingly.
Bernard – the migrations and testings are going well. I hope to be able to say that the system will be available in the next day or so. As I have said in the article exact timings depend upon how well everything is transferred. As I have answered before we will extend deadlines that are affected by this downtime by the same amount of time as we have been offline. Fiona
Our planning pages are now available at https://www.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/planning-buildings-land/planning/planning-application-search-and-comment.aspx . We used the 4-day outage to bring the 3rd area onto a new system. It marks the half-way point of this project to get all 6 former council areas onto 1 system. Any deadlines affected by the outage will be extended. Fiona