According to the schedule that we disclosed in November, the original planned ‘Go live’ date for the new system was 1 April 2025. According to the latest disclosure from Havant Borough Council’s Information Governance Officer, the actual implementation date was 6 August 2025. What we now know is that 11 December 2025 is the date on which the Planning Services missing pre-cutover planning data was first restored, at least for the files of a limited set of planning applications that HCS has been using as a test data set. So far, the new system is at least eight months late and there’s much further work to be done before it can be deemed acceptable.
Here at HCS, we’ve been contacted through the website by residents unhappy about the lack of response to their emails by Havant Borough Council’s planning services department. The example below, received on 15 December, is typical:
“I have been trying to get planning permission for an extension since early August and nothing has happened and it’s impossible to talk to anyone to find out what’s going on. As far as I can tell by rummaging through the weekly lists, hardly any decisions have been made since September and our allocated planning officer has only made one decision in that time. It seems a lot like maladministration but I don’t want to get into a fight about that. Do you have any insight into what is (not) going on?”
Havant Borough Council’s response
For the last three months, the council’s public message has been a variant of this:
Not only do we here at HCS have a great deal of sympathy for these members of the public, but we also have our own first hand experience of this HBC communications blackout, not just from Havant Borough Council’s planning services department, but also from the senior management team and elected leadership representatives.
The reality is rather different
If you’ve not been following our articles on this planning system debacle, or simply have not had time to read the detail, here’s the story so far in a nutshell:
In 2023, Havant Borough Council evaluated proposals from eleven software providers for replacement IT systems to support Planning Services, Licensing, and Environmental Services. In December 2023, the HBC Cabinet, no doubt influenced by its Lead for Digital, endorsed the Executive Head of Place’s decision to award the contract to the Arcus Global, the lowest-priced shortlisted bidder. A possibly ‘courageous’ decision given the supplier’s apparent exclusion from their bid of local customisation and the migration of the Borough’s planning records – data that could have become costly or even impossible to recover after the Council’s existing IT outsourcing contract with Capita concluded in September 2025.
The contract with Arcus Global was signed in April 2024, already three months later than scheduled, pushing back the development schedule by three months. Seven months into the implementation project, the Executive Head of Place resigned, leaving the Programme Manager role vacant.
On 6 August 2025, barely two months before the Capita IT outsourcing contract expired, the Council promoted the untested, incomplete, and clearly unsuitable, system into production use, a move which promptly stalled much of the local property market by removing its ability to conduct statutory land searches.
In September, having received complaints from residents, concerned that their property conveyancing chains were at risk of collapse, HCS offered the HBC leadership team expert professional support to urgently recover the missing data archive. That offer, along with all subsequent correspondence over the following three months, was ignored.
In October 2025, the HBC Chief Executive Officer took early retirement.
During October and November we started to piece together the facts from responses to an ongoing series of Freedom of Information Requests (FOIs). We now have a fairly clear idea of what went wrong and why, and expect to be able to publish further detail in January. What we will be unable to access will be details of the financial cost of this fiasco and just how the costs associated with the project overrun will be apportioned between Havant Borough Council and Arcus Global.
On 6 December, we published eight examples illustrating data corruption and functional regression visible in the system at that point, circulating the link to the relevant executives and council members on 8 December. Once again, there has been no direct response.
Current status
The current status, disclosed in response to a request for a formal review of an earlier FOI request, suggests that a bulk data migration operation was performed on 11 December which has at least partly restored a large number of missing documentation files and comments, partially addressing two of the eight examples previously reported.
As the comments by the Information Governance Officer state below, there is still further work to do:
“We are pleased to advise that the fix we referred to previously occurred on 11th December. The team have checked all the applications on your shortened list of applications you wished to be able to review, and all the comments and documents appear to be present, likewise where there are comments they are available for the fully list.
Please be aware there are some very small discrepancies in a couple of the applications when compared with the old Public Access site but that could be as a result of manual adjustment in the months since the implementation.
The original comments are all still dated 6 August 2025 (the implementation date) and we are working on a further solution to restore the original dates however it is a tricky/time consuming matching exercise to carry out and will take some time. There is also no guarantee that we will find a solution however we know we hold the data so we are again hopeful that this fix will follow albeit we do not expect it to be ready until end of January/February.”
Havant Borough Council didn’t simply mismanage this project – it walked, eyes open, into a wholly predictable collapse of a set of core statutory functions. This was not an accident of technology but a failure of judgement, oversight and basic competence.
Havant Civic Society 