Today's entry discusses the presentation of written
materials on the Planning Inspectorate website.
At a meeting of the National Infrastructure Planning Association
Legislation and Guidance Working Group last night, one of the
topics covered was the amount of written information that
accompanies applications, and the examination of applications,
under the Planning Act 2008, and how this affects accessibility by
local communities in particular.
First, it is of course good that all written material relating
to an applicaiton is made available to everyone. This has not been
the case with previous regimes and is clearly good for openness and
accessibility.
Secondly, the Planning Inspectorate (PINS) have a tough job to
present such large amounts of information in a way that makes it
easy to find - and easy to load (i.e. documents can't be too
large). At the last count, the Thames Tideway Tunnel page on the
PINS website contained 2,387 documents. It is a very
