Note – the list of issues with the council’s new Arcus Global Built Environment planning system at the foot of this post is being updated as we work through the new system. There’s clearly much work to be done.
There’s an interesting new planning application which has been posted for review and comment on Havant Borough Council’s new, partly-built planning system. This is a proposal for a mixture of two-storey and three-storey private houses and affordable apartments on the long-vacant former SEB brownfield site at the corner of Petersfield Road and Bartons Road.
You may recall that the previous application for the site was surprisingly rejected by the planning committee in November 2022. Perhaps just as well since as we reported when it first appeared in October 2020, it was hardly an architectural beauty. On first view however, this latest proposal makes far better use of the site.
The block of apartments can be seen at the top left of the layout above, with an indication of the style of the elevations shown below:
Whether this understated impression ‘works’ or not in its built form will depend largely on the colour of the bricks and cladding used. You can see an indication of the apartment layouts in the following example treatment for the second and third floors:
The indicative surrounding housing elevations are shown below, with a detail from a floor plan option for one of the three storey units. These show a compact, but thoughtfully-designed space. Once again, it’ll need an adventurous selection of brick facing and cladding to lift the appearance above the ordinary and we’d expect to see the enforcement of a future-proof direction for sustainability and energy efficiency.
The images in this post are taken from the planning documents which can be viewed in detail by selecting this link to the new planning system.
The new HBC Planning System
Please note that the council’s new planning system is clearly still ‘under construction’ so you may find a few surprises. If you’re interested, we cover the most obvious ones we’ve noticed below:
First, the good news:
Document links are now ‘persistent’, meaning that you can copy them into a document or an email and be sure that they will still work when referred to later. Particularly useful is the option to ‘Download All’ documents and providing that there are documents on the file this, in fact, becomes an essential function given the teething bugs which remain to be fixed before the new planning system can be declared fit for purpose.
The most obvious critical issues are listed below:
| 1 – Planning history detail (documents and comments) is currently missing, which will be impacting conveyancers, construction companies, architects and local residents’ group planning leads across the borough. While a search for a property shows a summary line for each historic planning application at the site, taking the links provided leads to summary pages with empty Comments and Documents links. |
| 2 – Searching for a planning application at a specific street or property, for example ‘South Street’, returns search results in the wrong sequence – oldest first, newest last. This is illogical and unhelpful, particularly given that the search criteria. |
| 3 – Searching for documents by keywords – for example ‘Campdown’ – is liable to give unreliable results. This suggests inadequate preparation for data cleansing prior to migration. If search for ‘Havant Road’ you get every entry which has ‘Havant’ or ‘Road’ in the address. |
| 4 – ‘Advanced Search’ – The selection criteria appear comprehensive, but of limited use without the ability to select multiple options within criteria. For example, you cannot select ‘Stakes’ and ‘Purbrook’ in a single search. The criteria for ‘Application type’ only allows selection of one value from a list of dozens of theoretically possible values. This looks like poor design from Arcus – the selection list should be drawn from actual values on the HBC history rather than every conceivable value. |
| 5 – Where documents have been loaded – for example for APP/25/00639 – the option to ‘Filter’ the document view is only useful if the case documents are correctly tagged when they are loaded. The filter for this particular case shows only three documents under category ‘Maps and Plans’ whereas, as many of the plan documents are untagged, they only appear under the category ‘None’. |
| 6 – In the document list, you cannot select to ‘view’ the document but are forced to ‘download’ it. This is unhelpful and should be replaced by a ‘view document’ option as per the previous idox solution. Users can then chose to download a document using their standard browser functions. Forcing unnecessary downloads each time a user clicks on a document is unhelpful and counterintuitive. |
Collectively, that summary suggests that little or no acceptance testing was performed by HBC Planning Services on this new service before it was made ‘live’.
Disappointing, but sadly not surprising.
Havant Civic Society 