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What is ePlanning?
A plain-English guide for councils: what ePlanning means, what good looks like, and where to start.
In short: ePlanning is the use of digital tools across the whole life of a plan, from writing and changing it, to helping people understand it, deciding applications under it, and learning how well it works. It delivers the most when every stage uses the same set of planning rules.
A definition
Electronic planning, or ePlanning, covers the processes, standards, systems and services that help a council deliver efficient planning services and good outcomes for liveable, thriving communities.
It isn’t a single piece of software. A council can have an online plan, an online consultation tool and an assessment system and still re-type the same rules three times. ePlanning is about joining those stages up.
The life of a plan
We think of it as five connected outcomes:
- Plan: the plan is written and changed well, with the community involved.
- Know: anyone can find out what applies to a property and why.
- Decide: applications are decided consistently, against the same rules.
- Monitor: the council knows what was approved, where, and on what conditions.
- Improve: the council learns how the plan is working and feeds that back into the next change.
What good looks like
- One set of planning rules, maintained once and used everywhere.
- The public sees exactly what the council has adopted, with proposed changes shown openly.
- Routine questions are answered online, any time, so planners can focus on complex ones.
- The rules people read before they apply are the rules used to assess their application.
- Every change to the plan is recorded and can be explained.
Where to start
Most councils start with the plan itself: getting it online in a form that’s accurate, searchable and tied to the property, so the public and staff can rely on it. Everything else builds on that.
Questions worth asking of any ePlanning system:
- Will the public see exactly what we’ve adopted, and nothing else?
- Can people find what applies to a property without knowing the plan’s structure?
- Will the same rules flow into consultation, assessment and monitoring, or be re-typed?
- Is every change recorded, and can we publish on our own timetable?
- Where is our data held, and is it used for anything else?