Planning: INSPIRE land parcel colouring

[polly64]

@edwardchalstrey1 @tomalrussell @matkoniecz

This issue relates to discussions with the Wildlife Trusts https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/ regarding co-working on the integration of data on the building stock and green space/the natural landscape. (The Trust brings together over 40 wildlife UK organisations and is a grassroots movement of people committed to restoring a third of the UK's land and seas for nature by 2030 and helping tackle the climate and ecological emergency. It has over 80,000 members and 30,000 volunteers).

The proposal here is to a) integrate and colour INSPIRE open land use polygons showing land parcel boundaries to show type of land use ownership and to b) interlink this with the proposed planning traffic light system/live streaming of planning data https://github.com/colouring-cities/colouring-london/issues/685, c) to encourage volunteers to colour in parcels. This is also in line with recent government announcement following Ukraine invasion that land ownership information would be made publicly available https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8259/

Proposed actions

• [ ] Integrate INSPIRE open dataset for London as test case - Turing REG (by March/April 2022)
• [ ] Integrate INSPIRE for Britain as soon as Colouring Britain is set up (Estimated by June)
• [ ] Create new feature allowing parcels to be coloured by dropdown
• [ ] Wildlife Trust to do call out to membership (July?)
• [ ] Data on land ownership crowdsourced - first stage
• [ ] strategy for collaborating on updating/managing dataset to be tested Sep/Dec

New feature draft brief

• [ ] Decide on which category where feature is to be located e.g. either under Planning/Sustainability or Streetscape (rename as Context?- to discuss))
• [ ] Possibly move ownership question currently in 'Community'
• [ ] Add ' Choose the type of ownership for this land parcel and following dropdown
• Central government owned
• Local government owned
• Charity owned
• Community owned/co-operative
• Privately owned (non commercial)
• Privately owned (commercial)
• Combination of these
• [ ] Add source link for the class selected except for Privately owned to project owner privacy

[polly64]

@matkoniecz @fallipalaiologou Here is the link to the land parcel polygon integration which we briefly talked re integrating a while back. It would be good to look at this at same time as conservation areas now we are coming to next stage especially as very recent proposed government legislation relaxing planning laws will mean that demand for tools that increase transparency/data relating to planning is likely to rise. iT would be good to test integrating INSPIRE polygons on the staging site allowing users to highlight development in land parcels as well as building polygons. This may be a more effective way of providing data on forthcoming development to citizens/civic groups, local authorities and developers than by building polygon.

[matkoniecz]

download link: https://use-land-property-data.service.gov.uk/datasets/inspire/download

[polly64]

@matkoniecz @fallipalaiologou

[PWhelpdale-RSWT]

Addition of Land registry polygons/parcels is very useful. However some planning applications may cover multiple polygons so is it possible to either: 1) add functionality that allowed the grouping of multiple polygons on the map to flag as a single planning application? Or 2) Have an option to allow users to add freehand boundaries for people to draw the full extent of a planning application - though I appreciate the latter would require a lot more coding in the background. Or 3) An ability to aggregate parcels together or to be able to batch update polygons/parcels with the same planning information (i.e a user selects multiple polygons and then chooses to ‘update all’ for example)

From a Wildlife Trust perspective we’d also want to go one step further than what this tool currently appears to allow. As well as flagging planning applications we’d want to ideally be able to: 1) attribute each one with a flag that shows that we had responded/commented on the application officially.
2) detail what we said/recommended on the planning portal. 3) come back at a later date and attribute the planning application with follow up notes or a simple flag to say whether or not the planning applicant took on board the suggestions and made improvements to their application for the benefit of wildlife and/or people.

Perhaps the easiest way to enable this sort of functionality would be to use an API to allow the data to be taken into another system where this info could be added?

One final question I had was around data quality checks and validation. Is there any mechanisms in place to check that submitted data is accurate and actually relates to real planning applications or does it work on good faith? Perhaps a corroborated approach where multiple users can flag that an application is valid (or not) i.e a simple upvote/down vote system for a simple final question such as 'is this a live valid planning application'

[polly64]

@PWhelpdale-RSWT @matkoniecz @fallipalaiologou thanks for this really helpful. We will look at each and update on plan.

For the live streamed data on planning this is from the GLA so an official source - we do have the option, currently shown on staging to say if you think something is missing, but we could also have a highlight button for whether something is wrong. For all crowdsourced categories there are verification buttons where u can see how many verifications there are and for designation categories also source links linked to designation IDs. Do of course make any further suggestions clarifications and we'll see what we can do

[polly64]

@matkoniecz could you update me and @mdsimpson42 on progress with layers - conservation areas or INSPIRE polgons, thanks

[matkoniecz]

@polly64 I plan to finish INSPIRE demo on Sunday.

[polly64]

@matkoniecz that's great news- there is already a lot of interest in this feature. I think @mdsimpson42 will contact you next week to chat re this and the new code for the INSPIRE and conservation layers which as you said will be relevant for all categories

[polly64]

@matkoniecz will you be able to demo today?

[polly64]

Hi @PWhelpdale-RSWT prgress at staging https://cl-staging.uksouth.cloudapp.azure.com/view/planning/2782836. I think that the more specific stuff to the trust initially would need be done via an API. Have a look at other layers we're adding. We'll be applying for another grant to extend the planning section so the grouping of polygons could be looked at then. Could you give more thoughts on the verification of application idea? We are looking to have the address in the green box and a method of clicking to go to the application link- is that enough.