The council participated in the trial of the e-Consultation Hub, a large national project aimed at making consultation on planning applications quicker, more effective and transparent.
Launched in spring 2008 by the Planning Portal and funded by CLG to help drive and enhance the Government's modernisation agenda, the Hub has been introduced to provide all the stakeholders in the planning process with the capability to complete both their internal and external consultations online.
October 2008 saw the successful completion of the official trial of the live system and the LPAs involved are already reporting significant improvements in the way they deliver their planning consultations.
Allison Tarrant is a technical supervisor on the projects team within Bristol City Council's City Development office. Her team has been using the e-Consultation hub since August 2008.
"It was very easy to get to grips with," Allison said. "A team from the Planning Portal came in to train our administrators and we've not experienced any difficulties when using it.
"It has definitely made the process a lot easier and quicker for us. English Heritage came on board as our consultee and we dealt with about 30 or 40 consultations from them through the e-Consultation hub over a two-month period. Although that doesn't seem like a vast amount, we were able to make the whole process a lot more time effective.
"Before we started using the hub, we were printing and photocopying significant amounts of paperwork and large plans. This has reduced significantly. The email prompts have also been particularly good. For example, we're advised when the consultee has responded to our communications via an email alert and we're then able to action any comments with our planning officers immediately."
And Allison is quick to recommend the e-Consultation Hub to other LPAs thinking of coming on board.
"It's definitely a good service and it has made our initial consultations with English Heritage much more effective. We do continue to hold regular face-to-face surgeries with officers from the body, but this is mainly due to the fact that they're also based in Bristol.
"I'm aware that ICT suppliers are developing connectors to the hub which will enable all consultation requests and responses automatically sent to and from the hub to be linked into the back office system. This will remove any element of double-key entry which will also help improve the efficiency of the process."
For more information on the Planning Portal visit the hyperlink below.
