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Introduction

Powys County Council’s Planning Policy team ran a Candidate Sites consultation in late 2022 inviting proposals for sites to be considered in the new Powys Replacement Local Development Plan.

Earlier that year Powys procured OpusConsult and OpusMap (the Opus system). They used the Opus system to run their Candidate Sites consultation online. Specifically, the Opus system enabled the public to submit all parts of their candidate site proposal digitally – including site plans – using their preferred web or mobile browser.

Challenges

“We’re a small team of 7 officers working in a hybrid set-up. Prior to procuring Opus we had no direct access to a digital constraints map to use in conjunction with our LDP consultations. Previously, candidate sites were supplied on paper or as PDFs and all had to be digitised inhouse which could take several weeks. Also, constraints information relating to proposed site locations had to be collated after the candidate sites had been submitted rather than at the point of submission. This restricted the types of questions we could ask and related information we could request from site proposers. We could see that the Opus System would provide the functionality we needed to overcome these problems right from the outset. It would make the candidate site submission process more accessible to the public and site data collected more usable, both to the public and to the Planning Policy team.”

Solutions

OpusConsult includes a custom form builder that allows planners to design and build their own consultation forms to engage the public online. The Powys team was able to ask the questions they wanted and phrase them how they wanted in their online Candidate Sites submission form. Their ability to customise the form ensured as much required data as possible could be captured and submitted online by candidate site proposers.

Being able to ask supplementary questions or request additional information based on answers given to previous questions ensured that all required data could be collected from the site proposer at the point of submission. This eliminated planners having to factor in a subsequent communication and clarification stage with proposers after the consultation had closed.

They were able to design and build an interactive Constraints Map in OpusMap from their GIS data as an integral part of the online Candidate Sites form.

Results

The combination of OpusConsult’s custom form builder and OpusMap’s interactive map builder allowed Powys County Council to build efficiencies into the Candidate Site process and gain significant time-savings because site proposers were able to complete their site submissions in one go via the online route. All of the data being submitted via the online form and interactive Constraints Map was coming through to the planners in a consistent structure and format even though there were variations in the answers and attachments on each form.

We benefit from the software automating a lot of the processes associated with running LDP consultations and preparing maps and documents in general. Removing the need for manual data entry by planners and simplifying or eliminating a number of data processing stages means we have more time to be planners!

Gayle Frewin
Policy Planner, Powys County Council

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