Open Digital Planning: Month 3

Our First Open Planning Dataset is Now Live for Adur and Worthing!

The holiday period certainly stretched our resources, but it also focused our determination, and we’re thrilled to report that we’ve made fantastic progress.

This month, we celebrated a moment we’ve been working towards for a long time — the launch of our very first open dataset. This felt like a huge win for the team and marks a landmark moment in our journey to make planning information in Adur and Worthing more transparent, accessible, and useful for everyone.

Unlocking Our Heritage

Our biggest achievement this month is the successful upload of our Conservation Areas dataset to the Open Digital Planning platform. This is the first substantial milestone on our ODP journey and makes critical information about our local heritage available to the public like never before.

So, what is a Conservation Area? The statutory definition is, ‘an area of special architectural or historic interest, the character of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance.’ These designated areas are protected to ensure their unique character is not lost over time. By making this data open, we are empowering residents, developers, and researchers with instant access to this important information.

We have updated our webpages with this information, making it easier than ever for you to see if a property falls within one of these protected zones.

• Explore Adur’s 7 Conservation Areas
• Explore Worthing’s 27 Conservation Areas

This single step has a powerful ripple effect. It provides better and easier access for the public, which in turn will reduce demand on our planning teams, freeing them up to focus on more complex work. Furthermore, by making this data open and accessible, we’re providing a vital resource for researchers, environmental groups, and heritage organisations to help protect and enhance our beautiful local and national environment.

Example of the raw JSON data:

"properties": {
        "reference": "WCA26",
        "name": "West Tarring",
        "designation_date": "1975",
        "document_URL": "",
        "document_type": "area-appraisal",
        "documentation_url": "https://www.adur-worthing.gov.uk/media/Media,99431,smxx.pdf",
        "entry_date": "1997-04-29",
        "start_date": "1997-04-29",
        "end_date": "",
        "geometry": "POLYGON ((513336.37 104076.66, 513334.57 104068.5, 513333.61 104064.03, 513333.61 104064.14, 513333.36 104062.68, 513332.78 104059.89, 513331.89 104055.98, 513331.7 104055.08, 513331.56 104054.63, 513331.31 104053.52, 513331.06 104051.73, 513329.87 104041.48, 513329.82 104040.92, 513329.7 104039.92, 513329.46 104034.57, 513356.53 104034.16, 513357.73 104034.18, 513359.35 104034.11, 513360.9 104034.03, 513363.51 104034.09, 513369 104033.98, 513369.78 104034, 513374.29 104033.99, 513378.87 104033.86, 513378.67 104001.38, 513378.68 104000.71, 513378.63 104000.04, 513378.61 103997.26, 513378.44 103989.13, 513378.3 103982.79, 513378.08 103976.23, 513378.07 103973.56, 513377.96 103969.1, 513377.87 103966.76, 513368.37 103966, 513361.83 103965.41, 513360 103965.26, 513354.52 103964.7, 513351.01 103964.4, 513350.65 103964.39, 513350.51 103964.39, 513346.01 103963.96, 513344.18 103963.8, 513343.54 103967.13, 513343.15 103969.12, 513343.07 103969.57, 513342.67 103971.67, 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      }

Building Stronger Foundations for the Future

Launching our first dataset is a huge public-facing achievement, and it’s powered by a huge amount of work behind the scenes to get our data in order.

First, we are delighted to announce that our newly recruited team member has accepted the post and will be starting in September. This is a fantastic boost for the project and will be instrumental in helping us accelerate our work and tackle our ambitious goals.

We have also begun the essential work of taming the paper trail. We successfully collated all paper records for Tree Preservation Orders (TPOs) into a single, centralised location. This is a critical first step in the long process of digitising, cleansing, and eventually publishing this vital data, making it easier to protect our valued local trees.

Finally, we are continually investing in our team’s skills. Work has officially begun on improving our HM Land Registry (HMLR) Land Charges data, starting with comprehensive training on a new migration data cleansing tool. This not only improves the quality of our data but also equips our staff with the modern skills needed for a digital-first council.

Mapping the Path Forward: Collaboration and Transparency

A key part of this process is understanding the true scale of the work ahead. This month, our Digital and Planning teams came together to do just that. We held a joint workshop to conduct a deep-dive analysis of our TPO data, running through worst-case scenarios for data cleansing. This exercise was incredibly valuable, giving us a clear-eyed view of the challenge and allowing us to plan our resources effectively. This kind of proactive planning is essential for ensuring we deliver a robust and reliable final dataset.

We have also identified that our Article 4 and Listed Building datasets require more work before they are ready for publication. This is the next logical step in our data preparation pipeline, and the lessons learned from the Conservation Areas and TPOs will be invaluable.

While we are proud of our focused progress, the reality of reduced staff availability over the summer meant we made a strategic decision to concentrate all our energy on hitting our most critical milestone: getting our first dataset live. While this meant pausing some of our exploratory work and other areas of our Action Plan, it ensured we delivered a tangible, high-value asset for the public.

Expanding Our Horizons: Transforming Building Control

Our journey to open up planning data is also shining a light on opportunities to improve other crucial services, and we’re seizing them. Our Business Analyst has begun looking into improving the business-as-usual (BAU) work for our Building Control team.

This transformation improvement work is vital for two reasons. Firstly, it will streamline day-to-day processes for the team, making their work more efficient. Secondly, it will allow us to meet the new requirements set out by the national Building Safety Regulator, ensuring our services are compliant and fit for the future.

Looking ahead, we will also explore system enhancements, including a new functionality to link related building control applications to their corresponding planning applications. This will create a more joined-up, intuitive, and efficient system for both our staff and the public.

What’s Next on Our Journey?

We have a clear plan and are excited to maintain our momentum into the autumn. Our immediate priorities are:

• Onboarding our new team member and getting them up to speed on this vital ODP work.
• Meeting with Planning Policy experts to progress our action plan goal of improving community engagement.
• Starting the preparation work for our next datasets, beginning with Article 4 Directions.
• Beginning the hands-on data cleansing for both HMLR Land Charges and Tree Preservation Orders.
• Contributing to national research by completing the ODP Extract Research Survey to support technological improvement across the sector.