Thirty-one councils and 21 wider public sector organisations are now engaged with tellmescotland, the national public information notices portal. Dundee City Council is now uploading planning, licensing, traffic and general notices, Scottish Borders Council now publishes its traffic notices with planning to follow shortly, and East Renfrewshire Council is working to get its licensing and roads notices on the live site by the end of November.
Several other councils are working towards uploading their notices to the live site, including:
- Renfrewshire Council - Planning
- Perth and Kinross Council - Planning and Roads
- Dumfries and Galloway Council - Licensing
- West Dunbartonshire Council - Planning
- East Lothian Council - Traffic
Training is being arranged with Midlothian, East Dunbartonshire, North Lanarkshire and West Lothian Councils and an engagement meeting is to be held with Orkney Islands Council in January 2012.
Some of you may have noticed the recent changes to the tellmescotland staging site. A temporary solution has been put in place to incorporate wider public sector organisations, due to be applied to the live site very soon. The Care Inspectorate, the General Teaching Council for Scotland, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland, the Scottish Boundaries Commission, the Water Industry Commission for Scotland and the Scottish Legal Aid Board are to be the first of the wider organisations to publish their public notices on tellmescotland. The PINs Project Team continue to engage with further organisations and the target is to have 20 online by March 2012.
Developments
A meeting has been held between Ordnance Survey (OS), the Improvement Service and Spider Online to discuss the use of OS maps within tellmescotland. A discussion will be held at the next Steering Group meeting on 14 December to reach some agreement on whether to continue using Google maps or switch to OS maps.
Northgate have completed their work on the enhanced Licensing interface and this is currently being tested by Peter Smith at Glasgow City Council. Peter will be giving an update on this at the December Steering Group meeting.
Promotion
More and more councils are uploading their notices to the portal and so it is essential that the public is aware of and take advantage of the site. There have been almost 13,000 visits and just under 90,000 pages views on the site since last year and it is important that this number continues to rise. Increased visitor numbers will also help support the case for legislative change. Councils can use the Clackmannanshire Council case study as a checklist for promotional activity. You can also find the tellme buttons, banners and information to inform newsletter/website articles on the PINs Community of Practice.
Other news
We would like to welcome Tina McLelland, the new Project Manager for the PINs Project. Tina has recently joined the Improvement Service and will working part-time on PINs. Her contact details can be found below.
Regarding the latest position on the potential legislative changes, we have produced a paper jointly with COSLA that was submitted to COSLA Leaders on 18th November 2011. The paper was approved and actions will be taken forward with COSLA around a number of recommendations contained within the report.
A strong advocate of the PINs Portal since the beginning, Pauline McGillivray from Glasgow City Council's Planning department has now taken this support one step further. As well as now featuring a link to tellmescotland on her Planning web pages, as of January 2012 Glasgow City Council Planning Public Notices can only be viewed on tellmescotland. Pauline will continue to display notices on the Council website until the end of this year, for completeness of records, however from January next year, if the public wish to view a Planning notice they will be directed to tellmescotland.
More information
For more information, contact the PINs project team:
Joanna Anderson, Tel: 01506 775575
Tom McHugh, Tel: 07766443459
Tina McLelland, Tel: 01506 775599
