Press Ad savings - Use QR code? - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

I can sympathise with the costs and looking for savings. However, gvien newpaper ads are one of the backstops for those hard to reash audiences who are less likely to be digitally enabled, I'm not sure that a QR code replacement would meet an equality impact assessment for such a change - and I certainly wouldn't make such a drastic change without undertaking that assessment. 

Hans

Surrey County Council

The requirement for the publicity notice is set out in The Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015 (as amended).  It requires publication of the notice in a newspaper circulating in the locality in which the land to which the application relates is situated.

The form the publicity should take is set out in the appended Schedules.   As originally drafted it looks like the neighbour notification letter, site notice and the press advert were intended to be the same.   I seem to recall that the requirement is to reproduce these notices exactly, or “in like kind.”     Over the years Authorities have taken “like kind” to be pragmatic and create letters, notices and adverts that do the job at the least cost.   For newspaper adverts that means limiting information to a minimum, using small font and minimising “white space” in the advert. 

There is a separate requirement to publish the information on your website, so the question is if you were challenged to explain why your advert doesn’t look like the template in the Procedure Order are you happy you can either defend your position.  Or I suppose the real question is how risk adverse is your Council?  Are you prepared to take the risk and accept the consequences if you are ever challenged?

Alastair Nicholson

Buckinghamshire Council

I agree with Alistair's response and would point out that over many years Local Authorities and other bodies have lobbied Government to remove this burden and time factor - you have to comply with newspaper publication deadlines and this may delay the process.

I don't want to read too much into it, but I have been asked just the other day how much of a difference a change to the press notice requirement would make to councils. 

I don't have any modern data - does anyone fancy sharing their annual cost with me? I can then scale it up to make some sort of national estimate. 

Richard,

Buckinghamshire Council spent  2022-2023 = £165,257.

We then all harmonised our legacy contracts and reformatted the adverts and for 2023-2024 = £110,295.

Regards,

Alastair Nicholson

Planning Business & Improvement Manager

Hi Richard

For Brent its about £25-30K on application notices and £2K on article 4/Conservation Area boundary amendments.

Regards

Paul