Lichfield District Council is in an historic, rural location with big public demand for visible planning decisions. There is also a high volume of applications for the area’s size.

To manage the planning department’s workload and communicate with local stakeholders, a user-friendly website supplying helpful information is vital. Here’s how they did it…

Name

Lichfield planning portal

Client

Lichfield District Council

When it happened

2009

Budget

Carried out within existing budgets.

Brief

To create website that does a good job of presenting information about planning.

Aims

• Easy access to search tools
• Map of latest applications
• Clear navigation and layout
• Link on every page of the council’s site – making planning ever-present

How it is done

The web manager talks regularly with Lichfield’s planning department and the planning team are proactive and regularly update content on the site.

Planners and developers originally specified what they wanted from the planning homepage, as opposed to the general public. The information needed by applicants, agents or statutory consultees differs from that of the general public, which just wants to know what the council is doing.

Planning portals tend to use external web systems to present information, which suffer from poor accessibility and design, and are hard to integrate with the wider corporate site. The designer has put planning info into a format that presents it in a variety of ways on the site. This means Lichfield is able to more closely integrate planning data with customer’s requests for information on their area, and that data can be displayed in user-friendly format such as Google Maps.

Search is an important tool for website users, but often planning information is not returned when searching a council’s website, because planning teams use third party web developers. By altering the search functionality, the main site search now recognises when a user is searching for a planning application and redirects them to the appropriate part of the site. It makes for a seamless user experience.

Communicate planning decisions to the public through tools such as email updates, RSS feeds, and Twitter.

Key benefits

Increased accessibility for public to planning decisions and ongoing applications

Cheap way of increasing transparency and communicating planning news

Modern approach to offering planning data

• Best Practice: London Brownfields Sites Database
• Coalition to scrap Infrastructure Planning Commission
• 10,000 planning applications to be scrapped
• Best practice: the Crown Estate’s Regent Street planning
• Planning bodies warn cuts will slow planning system