London Borough of Southwark

Planning services are currently dependent on proprietary solutions that are developing slowly and resistant to interoperability.

The problems associated with these include:

• High cost of change – projects cost over £1m to transition from one provider to another and are lengthy and resource intensive
• Failure to meet the user needs of residents – for example, over 40% of applications submitted via Planning Portal arrive incomplete
• Failure to meet the user needs of council officials with a poor and non-responsive user interfaces
• Hackney estimates it spends over £250,000 in officer time handling administration
• Poor data quality affecting strategic planning considerations such as not knowing how many young families may move into a new development and require school places
• Inability to meet the standards set out in the Local Digital Declaration and a total reliance on software improvement roadmaps that planning authorities cannot influence
• Poor integration capabilities preventing join up of integral parts of the planning system

Authorities are lacking a user centred solution which provides the back-end case management interface, transactional functions and database necessary to manage a planning application service. We want to understand how a cross-authority solution could unlock wider transformation of the planning system.