Planning permissions ‘Single register of planning’ discovery: Sprint notes 14-28 Jan 2019

Emily Robertson-Knowlton — 2019-01-30

Headlines

Creating and validating a basic model of planning applications, with information and insights from our Discovery phase user research interviews thus far.

Kicked off the project! See this blog post.
Created a draft roadmap for the Discovery and Alpha phases of this work.
Arranged and held 7+ stakeholder and user research interviews to find out more about the lifecycle of a planning application, the data links around planning applications and permissions, the schema that existing planning application/permissions viewing tools have, what kinds of people make use of planning applications/permissions data, and how a central government data source might be able to help them.

Continue to speak with stakeholders and users about these questions.
Refine our discovery research focus as we get more insights from the interviews.
Adjust our model of planning submissions and draft some ideas of how to link the data around the site and the submissions together.

There is a lot of jargon and various terms around planning permissions - can we create a set of common terms and definitions to use consistently?
How might we link planning submissions together?
How could a user check on start, progress, and completion of a planned site?
How might we get more structured data flowing through the system?

There has been a lot of work in this area already, and we are researching and talking to people who have worked on products around planning applications and permissions, e.g. Planning Alerts, Adrian Short’s scraper, PlanIt and PlanningFinder. We need to learn from previous successes, challenges, and lessons learned. Let us know if you have a connection or idea of someone we could talk to in our research!