Re: Date stamping of planning application details - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

We at stroud avoid date stamping any information submitted. Our post process separates off paper documents to planning and we scan them on date of receipt. These are electronically tagged with audit data such as date and time, and the user ID - all of which is better than a date stamp. Portal applications are not printed and re-scanned, merely indexed to IDOX.

How you process the application is something the local Head of DC should make the call on, as how the paper and electronic applications are handled and recorded should be set by how you plan to use them if a legal dispute arises. (i.e. are you planning on using paper only files in court or electronic files, or a mix dependant on whether they arrived on paper, or where “born” electronic) For departments set up for “End-to-End” electronic planning you can usually rely on the file create and modify data that is automatically created on most systems, and the associated application based audit. Your IT department should be able to help if you are having difficulties seeing this information. If you have any electronic documents that you are particularly nervous about, then you can use a Digital Notary Service, and e-mail back the signed and time stamped documents to the sender explaining these are the ones you are using (your e-mail being archived). If you are relying on the system timestamps, then you need to have a chat with your IT team, to make sure that the time on the server is synchronised with one of the recognised time clocks. This is done using Network Time Protocol (NTP). Personally I can think of many ways that the old received time stamp on the paper could be challenged if somebody was so minded, so I don’t perceive an advantage to having it, IF, everything is going into the computer systems as soon as it arrives (End-to-End Electronic Planning). If you have a lag between paper receipt and scanning, then you still need to keep stamping the documents to work out the “time-to-scan” lag, and answer any dispute over when a document arrived. (note documents e-mailed in should be auto-archived by your IT department) In the authorities where I have deployed electronic planning or other regulatory systems, this is something that was covered in the project documentation under the heading of "Legal Admissibility". The relevant standard is called BIP 0008:2008 "Evidential Weight and Legal Admissibility of Information Stored Electronically"