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Missing update notifications from gov.uk

richard white, modified 7 Months ago.

Missing update notifications from gov.uk

Advocate Posts: 212 Join Date: 26/11/18 Recent Posts

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated that after someone at gov.uk built a perfectly good webpage with an update subscription engine ('Get emails about this page), it seems to be being neglected and has become broken.

See https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/planning-practice-guidance

Planning practice guidance

The National Planning Policy Framework and relevant planning practice guidance.

From:
Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government
Published
29 November 2016
Last updated
24 June 2021 — See all updates

The National Planning Policy Framework was published on 27 March 2012 and revised in 2018, 2019 and most recently 20 July 2021. It sets out the government’s planning policies for England and how these are expected to be applied.

 

I noticed a while ago that  I would see mentions in the planning press of updates to the NPPG - but I had stopped receiving auto update emails from gov.uk

I'm not an IT guy, but when you look closer you can see the possible cause - the updates log has not been kept up to date - the last update logged is June 2021 whereas we all know there have been a great many updates since.

See https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/planning-practice-guidance#full-publication-update-history

I have written to gov.uk about this but had no response, so I thought I would post something here to see if anyone else has noticed this problem and i nthe hope that someone (i.e. Richard C) might be able to shake the tree and get this fixed please :)

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Richard Crawley, modified 7 Months ago.

RE: Missing update notifications from gov.uk

Expert Posts: 253 Join Date: 07/12/11 Recent Posts

Hello Richard W

I still get daily emails on my preferences (which are planning and building). 

Is the problem that updates to NPPG are not being flagged as being part of that policy area? (or even not being flagged as updates?)

 

richard white, modified 7 Months ago.

RE: Missing update notifications from gov.uk

Advocate Posts: 212 Join Date: 26/11/18 Recent Posts

It looks to me as if the root problem is that they are not being logged as updates at all - at least not on the main PPG page.

If you look at the main page https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/planning-practice-guidance - this says the last update was in 2021 despite many of the subpages e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/renewable-and-low-carbon-energy showing more recent updates

I'm not an IT guy but I would have thought updates would cascade and it shouldn't be necessary to individually subscribe to each of the circa 30 sub pages linked from the main page...

I have now also subscribed on a seperate email accounts to updates from the alternative sign up page  https://www.gov.uk/email-signup?link=/housing-local-and-community/planning-and-building to see what happens

 

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Richard Crawley, modified 6 Months ago.

RE: Missing update notifications from gov.uk

Expert Posts: 253 Join Date: 07/12/11 Recent Posts

I have an answer - I don't think you're going to like it

"To answer your question about updates to the NPPF on the .gov.uk website – as the website is only a collection page of links, it only registers as updated if a new link is added to new guidance. This hasn’t been done in two years hence why the page hasn’t been updated since June 2021. Some of the linked guidance will have been updated in that time but you would need to subscribe for email alerts individually and directly on the guidance pages you are interested in. You could equally subscribe at a topic level, though this will increase the scope of the content included."

 

I've made the point that this is slightly silly from a users perspective, but I suspect I'm going to get an answer back along the lines of "but this is how .ogv.uk works". 

Richard

richard white, modified 6 Months ago.

RE: Missing update notifications from gov.uk

Advocate Posts: 212 Join Date: 26/11/18 Recent Posts

Richard

Many thanks for following up on this

richard white, modified 6 Months ago.

RE: Missing update notifications from gov.uk

Advocate Posts: 212 Join Date: 26/11/18 Recent Posts

The topic level option doesn't seem to have an option to sift Building Control from Planning - so not really an option for me sorry

I guess I'll be subbing to each of the 30 or so PPG pages one at a time...