Cheshire East Council’s “upgraded” planning portal has come under fire after residents and a parish council were unable to comment on some plans or view documents online, writes Belinda Ryan.
Mobberley Parish Council, which acts as a consultee on applications in its area, was unable to view some documents at its recent planning meeting.
Parish council chair Hannah Moss said: “We had a planning meeting on Monday night. Councillors hadn’t been able to prepare because they couldn’t view documents on the planning portal.
“Some of the applications we couldn’t even determine and we’ve had to go to Cheshire East and ask them for further information so we can review the applications because we just can’t view them.
“There were concerns that comments from residents on applications aren’t getting recorded and it could cause an issue then as to how planning applications are viewed by officers.”
The Local Democracy Reporting Service has been contacted by residents from Crewe, Knutsford and Macclesfield complaining about the new planning portal.
Cllr Mick Warren (Ind), chair of Cheshire East Council environment and communities committee, said: “The council has recently changed to a ‘cloud’ based system for viewing and commenting on planning applications.
“It replaces the old, unsupported technology that was previously being used by the council with a system that will increase people being able to self-serve and reduce officer time and resource spent on manual intervention.
“As is often the case with the rollout of any new system, and despite extensive user testing beforehand, some issues with how it is currently operating have been identified since it went live.
“This includes issues with opening some planning application documents and comments that were submitted to the council via Microsoft Outlook before the new system went live.”
He added: “We are aware that some people are being prompted to view these documents/comments by opening or downloading Microsoft Outlook.
“This should not be the case and we are actively working with the supplier of this new system to try and identify a solution to this.
“We apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused and would like to thank them for their patience during the transition to this new system.
“We would also like to reassure people that our planning officers continue to consider all documents/comments as part of their normal assessment of applications and the decision-making process itself remains unaffected by this new system rollout.”
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