Town announcement
One of the joys of starting up Town Legal with colleagues has been the opportunity to play with technology so as to see how up to date information relevant to planners and planning lawyers can be made more readily available, with a little bit of focus on where the gaps are. We have constantly asked ourselves what may be useful to increase people’s understanding and ability to predict outcomes, but which may not be fully accessible?
That was the rationale for the Planning Court Judgments weekly update (with its click through to a full, searchable, list of Planning Court judgments since 2014), announced in my 2 August 2018 blog post . The update now has around 370 subscribers. The latest update, for the week ending 16 November 2018, is at this link. Free subscription is still available via this link. I am really grateful for the hard work of Susie Herbert and other Town associates in preparing, to a weekly deadline, the various case summaries.
We can now announce another Town Library service: a weekly list of decision letters issued in the preceding week by the Secretary of State or Planning Inspectorate. The list comprises section 77 and 78 appeals in relation to proposals for major development that have been determined following a public inquiry, rather than informal hearing or written representations. The latest update, for the week ending 16 November 2018 is at this link. Free subscription is available via this link.
This latest service goes beyond the Planning Court judgments service in that it is fully automated. It was again devised by us in association with legal engineers Wavelength Law, drawing upon the Planning Inspectorate’s website. We are grateful to the Planning Inspectorate for its online service and hope that our weekly updates will assist people both in accessing its content and in generally gaining a better understanding of likely appeal outcomes. Not part of the free update service but with Wavelength’s help we can re-cut the PINS data (which we have in a searchable database going back to 2012) in all manner of ways for individual requirements – if this would be useful for a particular project that we are acting on do let me know – or another Town partner.
Please bear with us as we continue to experiment with update formats and continue to iron out various issues but, as always, comments and suggestions are very welcome. We have plenty more strands of development underway.
I have always loved libraries.
Simon Ricketts, 22 November 2018
Personal views, et cetera
SIMONICITY 