Online Planning Portal a ‘towering success’, says DCLG
One million planning applications have now been processed by the online Planning Portal service, with the millionth application submitted by a householder in Leicestershire, the government said yesterday.
A news release, issued by the Department for Communities and Local Government, says that the “lucky” one millionth application will be processed by Hinkley and Bosworth Borough Council. According to the DCLG, the website has now delivered savings of approximately £285 million to applicants and councils since it processed its first application in 2003. Nearly 60 per cent of all applications in England and Wales are now submitted electronically via the website, it says.
The achievement was lauded by planning minister Bob Neill, who said that the service was “swift and robust”. He said: “The benefits of using the Planning Portal are clear to see, especially with the savings it is delivering on a regular basis. I’m delighted the portal has reached this very significant, one million milestone.”
In a particularly imaginative attempt to make this news exciting to those outside of the planning sector, the DCLG spin doctors have provided a set of examples to show just how much paper the service has saved (32 million pieces of paper, apparently).
The DCLG says that:
- this paper, if stacked up, would be more than four times higher than the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (pictured above, right), or the same height as seven Empire State Buildings with Canary Wharf on top
- would weigh more than 150 tons, the weight of 21 double decker buses (pictured right) plus a camper van
- would be enough to cover an area the size of West Sussex
- would create a paper path 5,905 miles long that could stretch from London to Osaka in Japan
If any PlanningBlog readers are feeling a slight sense of déjà vu, this might be because this is not the first time the DCLG has made a show of cutting back planning paperwork. Launching the draft National Planning Policy Framework in July last year, decentralisation minister Greg Clark said that “national planning policy and central government guidance has become so bloated that it now contains more words than the complete works of Shakespeare“. This claim was challenged by website Fullfact. Would the department’s claims regarding the success of the Planning Portal withstand similar scrutiny?
jamie.carpenter@haymarket.com (Pictures by Salim Virji and Joi Ito).
