I have just received a response to my complaint about the Thanet planning website and published it with my reply for anyone who wishes to read it.
Simple complaint really, I complained that Thanet District Council has chosen to restrict access to comments on the UKPlanning website, that is on the public facing part of the website only.
You wouldn’t expect a complicated reply click here to read it.
Incidentally if you ever have occasion to complain to the council it’s most important to ensure that it is officially registered with the council and that you have a complaint reference number, otherwise you can’t up the anti to the Local Government Ombudsman.
News, Local history and Thanet issues from Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate see www.michaelsbookshop.com I publish over 200 books about the history of this area click here to look at them.
Wednesday 9 July 2008
7 comments:
Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.
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I think your point 5 is probably the most important issue (comments from the public not being shown). This might however be a default option offered by ukplanning - as many planning objectors might not be happy with their names appearing on the Internet. Some objectors might not even realise that their comments are available for public inspection in the paper planning file (for example when they've objected to a neighbour's planning application)!
ReplyDeleteI think a general problem may be in the way that TDC uses the Internet for planning and other committee paperwork. Many large organisations use the Internet as the *primary* storage mechanism for documents - so members of the organisation (and others) would go to the Internet/Intranet for copies of papers and minutes etc.
TDC appears to use the Internet as a secondary store, where (most) documents are archived later. A specific example of this are the committee meeting minutes and agendas. So far this year, the latest planning committee agenda on their web site is for 21-May-08 and the lastest set of minutes are for 16-April-08.
TDC say that the agendas are available in the week leading up to the meeting - we are however now 3 weeks after the 18-June-08 planning meeting, and there is still no agenda available for this meeting on their committee minutes and agenda web site. You can of course request a paper copy of the agenda, but I'm reluctant to do this regularly because of the amount of paper involved!
It does however lead to the situation that sometimes you only find out what is going to be discussed in a committee meeting after it has already taken place.
Perhaps a move to a web based 'content management system' to deal with the workflow for planning, committees and other matters would improve things.
gerald think this covers it
ReplyDeleteHi I commented on application TH/08/0400 about a week ago but the comment never appeared, was it lost in cyberspace, do I need to do it again?
Dear Michael,
The reason your comment is not showing on the UKPlanning website is due to
Thanet`s public access choices. Thanet District Council choose to restrict
access to these comments at this case status on the public facing website.
Kind Regards
Ryan Shearer
UKPlanning Operations Supervisor
Can anyone explain why officers at Thanet District Council are paid so much money? Did we (the public) vote to pay them these vast salaries? It seems to me they are being paid handsomely to obstruct the free-flow of information. The simplest request results in an obstructive response which then has to be taken to the next level. TDC then has the audacity to complain that people are wasting money by asking them things. I believe the term they use is "vexatious" and they apply it to anyone who asks them awkward questions which they do not want to answer. I would like to know just how much of our money they are wasting every year by pursuing this policy of wilful obstructiveness. I rarely see a letter from TDC which contains an answer to the question which was asked.
ReplyDelete18.58 I had to go down this road for over a year as far as the ombudsman, just in order to get TDC to get the environment agency to comment on the Pleasurama development.
ReplyDeleteRidiculous as it may sound just so they could recommend a flood risk assessment and escapes for the over 1,000 people who would be trapped inside in a tidal surge storm, like the ones in the past that have demolished buildings and great chunks of the harbour wall down there.
Gerald just for clarity this is what it says on the planning website where I made my comment, so I think transparency must be the default.
“Please note: Your comments, including your name and address will be viewable on this web site. Your telephone number and e-mail address will not be viewable on this website, however they will be made available to the applicant/agent and the local authority concerned.”
What you might not be aware of is that all access to information is sessions based. So If I locate a planning application and think "crikey I want to blog about it" I can not link directly to the planning application because the URL in my browser navigation bar carries a session ID for a session that will expire after a few hours.
ReplyDeleteI did finally find way to force the issue so I could attempt to teach my computer to look at the site for me (in the spirit of public minded research of course) and it took me over an hour to crack it - I have no doubts that your average web user would not know enough about web servers to spot how to do that (it took me long enough). It seems that all requests are converted to searches and then cached and the pages served from the cache - I wonder if they can not make changes because they do not know how.
(If they converted the data to XML I could have a far more flexible system running inside of a day. Two days if I had to do the conversion myself.)
The upshot of it is that this subtle technical barrier reduces the ability of bloggers to talk about applications.
Yes Mat the most irritating thing I found about it is you publish a link to a planning document, test it and it works ok, next thing someone tells you your link won’t work.
ReplyDeleteI am assuming this is asp is it possible to make a link that will work by removing the session id.
I have tried a few things and am waiting for the session to expire to see if any of them work.
Who did you complain to Michael?
ReplyDeleteI emailed the council, about their sole use of ukplanning.com, eleven days ago and am yet to receive a reply.