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"Promo SM" 💪

It is the most complicated application ever.

"promo sm"

Despite the timescales indicated (Nov 23 and April 24) we have seen council's adopting this already as of 2021/2022. We had an application submitted Aug 2021 refused in March 2022 as it did not achieve 10% net gain in biodiversity. During the application process the biodiversity officer did not comment on the application so we were unaware that the metric had already been adopted.

It appears the new system does not allow for the location plan data to be downloaded (in any format) until after submission of the application. That means if my practice uses the new system, we must buy access to the location plan twice. Once on your system and again in .dwg format for site plan creation. Even if it becomes an option to download this information before submission, this would be much later in the design process, than we would require access to such data. The location, and orientation of the project along with the site dimensions heavily influence the design of the scheme in all but the smallest of projects and as such is a consideration from day one, well before we would consider spending time uploading or inputting information (which in the early stages of the design may not even be available) into the Planning Portal. We would normally have been working on projects for weeks, if not months, before starting the process of submitting the application. You appear to be suggesting in the future the phasing out of submitted location plans and pushing for all location plans to be purchased via yourselves as part of the submission. There is an obvious financial incentive for you to do so, but that system will also be incompatible where feasibility studies and pre-application processes have been employed, where at the very least, a location plan will have already been purchased and initial drawings are required to have an informed discussion. Finally, having used your system for drawing location plan boundaries, I can confirm it needs some serious development to be useful. I can't find a way to delete only the blue line for example. The system only allows for deleting both the red and blue lines and on larger-scale applications it is near impossible to be efficient as there is no way to scroll the map left, right, up or down that is evident. Resorting to zooming in and out using the mouse scroll wheel is nothing more than a poor workaround. There also needs to be a way to add and remove nodes from lines/polygons created. In short, the new system is not compatible with our design processes, would result in double location plan fees to clients if the planning portal system were used (for the reasons I have given above) and take longer for us to produce location plans in your system than it does in CAD. Not forgetting the duplication, having already purchased and delineated a .dwg format location plan. Often the mapping data is out of date or inaccurate in more rural locations and so the boundaries shown on the OS Map need to be adjusted, or entire no longer present buildings deleted or newly constructed buildings added to reflect the current site and its surroundings on the location plan. How would we achieve such changes on the Planning Portal’s location plan system? Again, this all needs to take place at the very early stages of the design process.

"Promo SM" 😣

So to confirm; our clients are being asked to pay the planning portal to complete a stage of the planning departments job for them, receive a pdf file of a map they will have already paid for to create existing and proposed block plans for a project (because at launch this will only create a valid location plan)? Please just give us the option to miss this stage, and your additional fee, on your site. At this stage it appears to be an ill-conceived attempt to fix a niche problem for the local authority, at the client's cost and to the Planning Portal's benefit. I fear this is a parasitic business strategy which will embed the PP deeper into the local authorities work flow until they will not & cannot accept applications via any other system.

Will the location plans be downloadable in .DWG files so I can use it for my block plans for existing and proposed?