The Improvement Service has automated the process of publishing planning application notices on the tellmescotland platform – considerably reducing the time and resource that local authorities previously had to invest in the task.
tellmescotland is a citizen notification service that the Improvement Service manages, as part of a portfolio of citizen and data services, for the past nine years.
The IS has been continuously exploring ways to improve the service. As part of another project, the Spatial Hub, began automatically collecting the planning applications information from every planning authority several years ago.
This same information is now able to be served to tellmescotland to automatically share public notices (directed instantly to people’s phones or e-mails) whenever there is a requirement to do so.
Previously, this task was a manual process that took each planning authority many hours. So, this new development will significantly reduce the time and resource burden on those planning authorities, ensuring that they need only provide data once for it to be used in multiple different ways.
The IS has gone live with 16 planning authorities thus far and intend to ‘onboard’ another ten over the coming weeks.
The IS intends to move on to the automation of traffic and road closure public notices in the coming months. For any queries, please contact tellmescotland@improvementservice.org.uk