We’re wanting to reduce postage costs within our planning service and
we’re exploring a few options – very interested to hear from other
councils who have made changes to their process to achieve the same ends.
Essentially we have two main costs:
-
Posting out the site notices to officers so that they can put
them up
-
Sending letters to neighbours informing them of a planning
application nearby
With regards to 1)…
I believe some councils are now sending the site notice to the
applicant for them to put up themselves, and asking the applicant to
email a picture of the site notice in place (to meet the
requirements). Have you experienced any problems doing this?
With regards to 2)…
Have any councils moved over to emailing out neighbour letters or
simply stopped them altogether? Again, any problems or experiences
with doing this?
I’ve a few things to explore around this yet (how comprehensive an
emailing list of residents do we have, for example), and I’m also
exploring our own regulations/stated ways of working (example: our
council’s business plan states that we will ‘make decisions
[not just planning] in a transparent, open and inclusive
way’ which ceasing altogether may fall foul of).
I’m also aware of two previous threads on this subject (which are
quite old now):
Re:
Planning Application Adjoining Owner / Occupier Notification Letters
- Forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS) - Knowledge Hub (khub.net)
Re:
Site Notice or Neighbour Letter - Postal Charges increase. - Forum -
Planning Advisory Service (PAS) - Knowledge Hub (khub.net)
If you've made changes in these two areas however, I'd be really
interested to hear how you got on.
Thanks in advance,
Dave.
