Seven weeks have now passed since council officers were offered professional consultancy on large-scale data recovery – free of charge and safeguarded by a non-disclosure agreement. In the time since that offer was made, the Capita outsourcing contract has lapsed, the Chief Executive has stepped down, and amid mounting complaints and Freedom of Information requests, the officers’ continued silence has been conspicuous. Rather than engaging professionally, the original offer was diverted into the protracted and bureaucratic ‘information request’ process, where the questions it posed remain unanswered and issues unresolved.
At its meeting on 30 October 2025, the Planning Committee shed a little unexpected light on the data handling practices currently going on within Planning Services. On the same day, a separate formal information request yielded its first partial response – revealing, for the first time in public view, the ‘Full Business Case’ (FBC) that led to the recommendation to procure the Arcus solution.
In this post, we focus on a revealing exchange which took place at the start of the Planning Committee meeting, and offer some early observations on the limited content of the Business Case that has been released so far.
The Planning Committee Meeting
The planning application under consideration was a long-standing proposal for 85 dwellings on the Havant and Southdowns College carpark at Crookhorn, a brownfield site immediately to the north of the contentious Campdown greenfield site.
After a 90-minute meeting, the officer’s report was unanimously accepted, and anybody who wishes to view the entire meeting can do so by clicking the image above.
Our attention, however, is directed to a revealing ten-minute exchange at the outset of the meeting, during which Mr Weaver, Principal Planning Officer at HBC Planning Services, responded to concerns previously raised by Councillor Hulls (Hayling West). The exchange stood out for its substance: Councillor Hulls had clearly reviewed the case file in depth before the meeting, not simply relying on the officer’s report. He had observed similar issues to those documented previously by Havant Civic Society.
However, Councillor Hulls raised new details which distinguished this case file from those previously examined by HCS, suggesting that the case-by-case restoration of data is proceeding inconsistently and lacks the procedural rigour necessary for reliable audit and future reference.
The Data Integrity Question
We encourage you to view the ten minute video clip from the meeting in the link below.
In raising his concern, Councillor Hulls makes the following points (taken from the transcript which you can open in a separate tab via this link):
“… the papers were first issued on the 21st of October, [at which time] there were only 33 documents on the planning portal”
“Mr Weaver informed myself in an email that they were all uploaded. But when I looked at those documents on the 24th, there weren’t any comments – public comments – and over 50% of the titles didn’t match the documents which were there.”
“…I got an email on the 30th to say that all the titles had been changed back. But there’s still no comments.”
“Today, I’ve been informed that the comments are there, but they’re not in the comments section, they’re in the file section and you have to search [for them]. If you search for comments, it only shows there’s two comments. But actually, there’s 20 comments. You have to go through 21 pages of documents to find those specific comments which are ‘objections’ or ‘neutral’ comments.”
Councillor Hulls continues:
“My big worry is, my big concern is, that are we sure the officers [are] absolutely sure that the data and the documents, and all the comments, are uploaded correctly into the new system? Because there seems to be a haphazard way of it’s been done.”
“So that we’ve not had all the documentation from when the papers were published. It’s been drip-fed through to us, and my worry is, is it all there now? And I haven’t had a concrete answer from the officers to say it is.”
“At 4:00 today I had one from the acting Head of Planning…” [which suggested that] “… hopefully everything was there, but that didn’t sound very strong to me. So my big worry is at a later date, if more information comes to light, would this, would any determination we make still be valid, or would it be open to challenge?“
HCS shares Councillor Hull’s ‘big worry’, leading to the suggestion in our post on 28 October, that there should be a moratorium on the validation of new planning applications and a halt to decision-making on any currently undecided cases where unaudited manual data restoration may have taken place. The planning application which the committee was reviewing was one such case. Originally raised in 2022, with over 400 documents on the original case file, that case file had to be rebuilt manually following Havant’s implementation of the new Arcus planning system in August.
Let’s now unpick Mr Weaver’s response:
“Councillor Hulls has made reference to the email that was issued by the Head of Planning earlier this afternoon. Er um I just want to check that all members have received and read that that email. So yeah, the points that that are raised in it are that, certainly with regard to part two of the Planning Register, so those are decided applications. Obviously, what we’re considering tonight is an application that hasn’t been decided. But with decided applications, we’re still resolving the question of getting redacted documents online. That’s underway and that that should be resolved in the next few weeks. That doesn’t affect your deliberations this evening of this current application.”
HCS Comment: That’s a very puzzling assertion. To the best of our knowledge, all necessary redactions were applied to the legacy planning system content at the point of original upload. Why Planning Services now feel compelled to revisit redaction is unclear.
One possibility is, of course, that redaction is being selectively applied at the case file level – with staff determining on a case-by-case basis which historical records are deemed ‘no longer required’ . But surely not? That would constitute interference with the historical record which would be highly irregular and, one hopes, implausible.
Mr Weaver:
“With regard to current applications, as the note sets out, over 650,000 documents had to be transferred as part of the Arcus project. A total of 200 out of that 650,000 failed to load. Those have been checked. None of them relate to this case.”
HCS Comment: A failure rate of 200 out of 650,000 would suggest a satisfactory result for a system migration project. However, since Mr Weaver claims that none of the 200 failures related to this current case, and yet, since more than 50% of this current case files documents ended up being incorrectly titled, we feel that there’s something amiss with his definition of a ‘failure’.
HCS has witnessed the same issue of incorrectly mapped case file documents with the titles shown on the system on other case files that we’ve looked at. It would therefore be safe to assume that a significant percentage of the 650,000 Part 1 Register (current applications) documents ‘successfully’ loaded, have resulted in the similar errors. The rather confusingly numbered ‘Part 2 Register’ (decided applications) would be considerably larger.
Mr Weaver:
“So as officers we are content that the case file that is available for public scrutiny, is full, and does contain all the relevant information, and in particular the concerns raised about objections. They are all online. The case officer, Arleta Miszewska, actually started drafting her report before the document transfer happened. And so effectively we’ve been able to corroborate the number of objections that were in the original draft of the report against what is online and they do corroborate; 18 objections and two neutral comments.”
HCS Comment: This was a new issue for the HCS analyst. We’d already seen many hundreds of comments successfully reloaded under the ‘Comments’ tab on a different case file, albeit all with the same, incorrect, date. In Councillor Hulls’ case, Mr Weaver claims that the comments had been loaded, but instead of in the obvious place – under the ‘Comments’ tab, they’d been buried in the body of over 400 documents within the ‘Files’ tab which can only be viewed if downloaded. Furthermore, we can confirm that those misfiled comments were also incorrectly tagged, explaining why Councillor Hull’s search for comments only turned up two results.
Mr Weaver:
“So, we’re entirely content that you have all the information available to you and members of the public do. In terms of Councillor Hulls is obviously he and I have had a had a dialogue. Um, last Friday evening I advised all members of the committee that the uh, incorrect titling which is a problem on on some cases had been resolved. I advised you all of that. Uh, and I advise you that the public comments were available. And they were, uh they’re not under the comments tab, they’re in the documents tab, but they were.”
HCS Comment: The ‘incorrect titling’ may now have been corrected for this particular case, according to Mr Weaver, but it certainly still exists in other case files visible on the system.
Mr Weaver:
“We have met our statutory duty and as officers we feel that it is reasonable for you to proceed to determine this application this evening.
Thank you.“
The conduct of the vote
It’s worth paying close attention to the body language of committee members during the vote, see this point in the video clip. While Councillor’s Robert and Milne had clearly understood the case for deferral, when it came to those against, Councillors Keast, Shimbart and Horton swiftly raised their hands. It was Councillor Tanson’s seemingly reluctant raised finger which led to the loss of the motion. That’s something of a mystery given that he has a strong grounding in matters of information technology and would surely have understood the points being raised. Councillor Hagan chose to abstain, possibly influenced by his role as Vice Chair of the Governance Committee.
Rather more curious was the fact that the Chair of the Planning Committee, Councillor Brown, who was recorded in the meeting papers as ‘expected to attend’, declared an interest at the start of the meeting and made his exit right at the start, leaving his deputy, Councillor Keast, in the Chair.
Not for the first time, our monitoring of a Havant Borough Council Planning Committee meeting has raised suspicion that executive officers may have influenced the outcome.
The Full Business Case
The Full (sic) Business Case document for the procurement of the new system, received through a Freedom of Information Request, is not in fit state for comment, and like other information requests, has been sent back to the Governance Officer for a second attempt. It had been heavily edited by somebody using Foxit PDF Editor, the heading numbering, and even the subheading texts, bear little resemblance to the table of contents, a sure sign of a ham-fisted attempt to divert attention from its deficiencies. We will be reporting on this more fully in a separate future post.
We will, however, pick out one snippet taken from what purports to be the Executive Summary:
It is estimated that once the system is operational it will allow 1 x FTE planning officer time to be redeployed to undertake commercial work at a rate of £500 per day or £115,000 of income over the contract term. Furthermore, from year two 1 x FTE of technical / admin support time will be saved equating to £105,000 over the contract term.
Given the significant amount of officer and admin time being expended now on manipulating the case file data, these words – if they’re genuinely representative of the unexpurgated business case – would seem just a tad optimistic!
Havant Civic Society 