Susan Rintoul, Improvement Lead in the National Planning Improvement Team, explains how its Customer and Stakeholder Survey can help improve experiences with planning authorities.
One of the key findings from our ‘call for ideas’ last year was that many applicants and community representatives highlighted the need for a better user experience and customer care, stating that they would like planning authorities to engage more proactively and collaboratively.
When developing the National Planning Improvement Framework (NPIF), we made sure to incorporate this, with two of the twelve attributes of a ‘High Performing Planning Authority’ focusing on customer care and engagement and collaboration with stakeholders and communities.
During discussions when developing the NPIF, there was an interest in developing a national customer and stakeholder survey, similar to the survey undertaken for Building Standards. It was felt that this would provide consistency, as well as having minimal resource implications for planning authorities if it was taken forward by the National Planning Improvement team. It would allow us to pull out the strategic trends across Scotland while also providing planning authorities with a breakdown for their area.
When developing the survey, we worked with the High Level Group and Heads of Planning Scotland. We agreed that we would undertake the survey annually, to obtain a yearly dataset, allowing us to measure performance over time. We launched the survey on the 18 November, and it will be open for three weeks, closing at midnight on the 8th December.
We have asked the planning authorities to share it with their customers and stakeholders and it is intended to be filled out by all users of the planning authorities to collect views on the service received. We hope this is an opportunity for everyone to share what they think is working and where improvements can be made.
As this is the first year running the survey we are also looking for feedback on the survey itself and have included this as a final question.
Having a consistent approach across all 34 planning authorities will allow us to identify strategic issues and measure performance across Scotland. At the beginning of next year we will publish the results of this first survey. A breakdown for each planning authority will be provided to them and used as part of the attributes in NPIF.
Have you interacted with a Scottish planning authority in the last year? Then please do fill out the survey: National Planning Improvement - Customer and Stakeholder Survey