Weeknote—28 July 2023

As we approach August some members of the team have begun taking a well earned break, that said we’ve continued to make progress in a few areas.

Flood risk zones

Flood risk zones are needed for the next phase of PlanX. If a site sits within either flood risk zone 2 or flood risk zone 3 then a flood risk assessment will need to be carried out.

We’ve been looking at the data that is published by DEFRA (flood risk zone 2 and flood risk zone 3) and have developed a schema around this.

We believe that a single dataset for flood-risk-zone will be most useful, with a category for flood-risk-level to indicate whether its zone 2 or 3, and flood-risk-type to indicate whether the zone is fluvial, tidal or coastal.

It’s a much larger dataset than anything we’ve added to planning.data.gov.uk so far. Before adding rhe flood risk zone data we’ll need to do some work to further optimise the data pipeline.

Flood risk zone 3b

In conversations with some of the team at Great Yarmouth Borough Council we also learnt about “flood risk zone 3b” – we understand that these are in addition to the data published by DEFRA and will need to be provided by LPAs. We’ll be looking at these in more detail over the next week to make sure we know enough about them to define a data standard that LPAs can publish to.

A framework for data discoveries

We’ve continued to work on our design process for how we model new data standards. This week we published a first iteration of our framework for data discoveries. We’ll be testing this framework but hope that it helps us more quickly understand the needs around a particular dataset and helps us gather the information we need to model the data.

Iterating the tree preservation order specification

Also in the conversation that we had with Great Yarmouth we learnt a bit more about Tree Preservation Orders, in particular about how dates are recorded for when the order is made and then confirmed.

Based on that conversation we need to consider how the tree preservation order specification may need to change to support these dates. This will prompt some discussion about how we can safely iterate through versions of standards as our thinking evolves based on newly identified needs.

Getting together and aligning goals

On Wednesday some of the team got together in London. The main focus of the conversations was around making sure that as a service team we’re all focused on the right things, that we have clarity on how we can contribute towards our goals, and to identify where there are co-dependancies between the standards team and operations team.

We’ve committed to publishing our goals on the website, this is something that we’ll do in the next few weeks.