National rollout begins 

We’re pleased to announce the national rollout of our new online appeals service following its successful pilot phase. This represents a significant milestone in our digital transformation programme. 

The service has been thoroughly tested with five London boroughs (Barnet, Greenwich, Havering, Richmond upon Thames, and Bromley) who have been handling both householder appeals (fast-track cases) and section 78 (full planning) appeals through the system. 

Phased rollout approach 

We’re using a phased approach to roll out the service: 

• Cohort 1: Two local planning authorities have recently joined the pilot – Gloucestershire County Council and Gosport Borough Council. 
• Cohort 2: We will increase the number of authorities joining towards the end of July.
• National rollout: All authorities in England will join the service by December 2025. We will be sharing more details after the summer. 

Benefits for local planning authorities 

The new service offers several important improvements: 

• streamlined submission and management of appeals, making the process more efficient 
• a user-friendly LPA dashboard for reviewing and monitoring cases, following GOV.UK design principles 
• improved communication between all parties, reducing paper-based processes 
• continuous improvement of the system based on user feedback  

Show and tell for LPAs 

Last week, we ran a ‘show and tell’ attended by around 800 people from over 230 local planning authorities to showcase the new service and outline the changes. Recording of the session is below: 

Appeal a planning decision service Show and tell 

We received a wealth of excellent questions during the session and, while we managed to answer some of them live, we weren’t able to address all of them in the time available. We’re currently working through these questions and will aim to provide comprehensive responses as soon as possible. 

Thank you 

We want to thank our pilot local planning authorities for their valuable feedback and collaboration, which has been crucial in refining the service. We’re also grateful to our project team, casework teams and inspectors for their hard work in developing this system. 

Further information 

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