Recording housing land supply - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

I too am battling a little with this issue so would be keen if anyone out there has the simplest and cheapest solution.  Historically our SHLAA was effectively a register of sites without planning permission (in a bespoke and highly technical Access database bought in from a planning consultancy) while housing land monitoring in terms of allocated sites and those with permission is in Excel.  Now we have an overlap too of sites greater than 0.25h in both.  But duplication errors are all too common and transferring information from one to the other is taking a completely disproportionate length of time relative to the pretty limited value of the SHLAA itself since many of the sites do not contribute more importantly to the five year supply.

We are probably all guilty as planners of breaking the fundamental rule that information in databases should be entered and stored only once.  Every time we produce a new sub-list we tend to add updates or additional intelligence which don’t make it back to the original data list…so the benefits of that information are not captured for all to see and there is additional work to repeat the exercise.  A classic example I have had recently is updating housing site information for a 5 year supply argument pulling together new post April 2015 permissions, pre-apps etc. While this information has not been lost the person actually doing the April 2015 housing update is likely to have to replicate and re-work this this anyway to pick up additional information for example house types.

In theory it should be is simple enough to have a basic information record for on a site and through criteria coding say whether that site has permission, is a SHLAA site with no permission, on the brownfield register or small site register.  I cannot see why this in principle should not be possible and then there would be one update for all sites whether continually or once a year (as we do for completions).

So yes is anyone out there already doing well and willing to share their approach?

I'm currently looking at this now at my authority.  We are in a similar position as we have a number of different databases and sources when ideally everything would be stored within one comprehensive database that covers the entire planning process.  At present we have two Access databases (the SHLAA and also an exported planning permissions/completions database from Uniform), which are then subsequently combined in Excel and then mapped using GIS to form the five year supply.  This uses three software packages and at each stage of the process additional information/analysis is undertaken which is not updated within the 'original' data source.  Clearly this could be more efficient.

Personally I think it would be ideal to track everything within IDOX Uniform as a site works its way through the planning system from SHLAA site > pre-app > planning application > grant of permission > implementation of permission.  Currently we are only storing the 'middle' part of the process within Uniform, with separate databases for the 'front end' (SHLAA) and 'back end' (completions).  

Adding additional information fields to existing Uniform records would save a significant amount of officer time with regards to data entry and reduce the likelihood of error/double-counting.  This site monitoring and assessment work will become an ongoing annual requirement as a result of the LPEG Expert Group recommendations alongside the Brownfield Register in any case, so we need to improve the system to make it as efficient and effective as possible.  

Does anyone know if it is possible to link and store SHLAA ('front end') and completion ('back end') information in Uniform?  Or are there any other solutions out there?

Anthony