Benchmarking – improving planning services

(this article is reproduced with the permission of the journal of the TCPA) The Planning Advisory Service (PAS) is a government-funded programme of improvement for local authorities. Eighteen months ago we began a project for managers of planning services. This is the story of one authority, Hastings Borough Council, who were in our very first [...]

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Super planning authorities

A little while ago, I was presenting some of my geeky stats to a room full of people. We were reviewing how variable the workload coming into a planning department is – much more than you’d imagine. My argument is that simple performance measures (we will validate 90% of applications on the same day) are [...]

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MEPS tools part 2 – “the factory gate”

After a fairly heavy set-up, this is a more relaxed look at some of the visualisations possible when you have benchmarked your data. This, if you like, is the pay-off for the hassle of aligning your data with the standards. Our first one is nicknamed “the factory gate”, and treats the application system as if [...]

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MEPs tools part 1 – installing R, ggplot2 and sample data

To ease the burden of supporting our benchmarking project “managing excellent planning services” (aka MEPS) we have been experimenting with some stats toys. While this started out as a “howto” in excel, the idea of being welded to a mouse for the next few weeks did not appeal. This is the technical set-up, where I [...]

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