Council puts planning applications online

Crawley Borough Council is giving the public better visibility of planning applications by allowing the public to view more information online.

The council processes around 1,000 planning applications each year - which creates a huge amount of paperwork such as plans, photos and reports.

In order to streamline the planning application process as part of the government's Implementing Electronic Government (IEG) targets, Crawley decided to make such information online.

Malcolm Telfer, internet technology developer at Crawley Borough Council, told silicon.com: "The objectives were to make all planning documents and the status of planning applications available to the public and to allow them to comment on applications."

Previously, people making applications would have to call in the council's offices to enquire about the status of their application or visit the town hall if they wanted to look at plans - and then write in if they wanted to make comments.

The council is using the National Planning Portal infrastructure for submissions of plans. "We've automated the importation of the plans into our systems rather than create that front end," he explained.

But as 95 per cent of applications to the council still arrive on paper, they are sent of to a scanning house to be converted into digital versions which are then loaded into the system.

The council uses its Stellent content management system as part of the planning application system to help users find documents fast.

Information on the status of planning applications is also imported into the system from the council's administrative back end systems.

Developing the new system using infrastructure the council already had in place was "cheaper and better" than going for a hosted offering, Telfer said. The implementation was completed in September last year, taking five months.

The savings in time and cost are significant, he said.

"The planning department have got a benefit in that they can see their documents online. People aren't phoning in as much and can see plans online rather than visiting the offices."

The next steps for the project are to add new measurement tools to the system and to tighten integration with the Planning Portal when volumes of applications passing through it increase.