Home » About

About



The Planning App is a tool used mainly by the Kingston CAACs

The Planning App supports the work of the three CAACs and similar committees and groups with its focus in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. Our aim is to assist volunteers in their work to help protect and enhance the boroughs' built environment, especially within the Conservation Areas.


What we are aiming to achieve
  1. Firstly we aim to put comprehensive information about CAACs and Conservation Areas into the public domain and make it accessible. This includes CAAC appraisals.
  2. We aim to automate CAAC meeting agendas and make these publicly available. The applications lists for each meeting are read and processed from the Council's Planning portal.
  3. We aim to improve CAAC workflow, communication & engagement.
  4. Since we have planning applications on file, we aim to make them accessible with search and filtering.

What the PlanningApp does
  1. Overnight it reads the latest updates to validated planning applications from the Council's Planning portal.
  2. It sends a weekly email update to those subscribed.
  3. The relevant planning applications are added to CAAC meeting agendas.
  4. It checks for updates daily - eg. application decisions made or documents added.
  5. It forwards emails received.

It also supports:

  1. Updating CAAC meeting agendas & adding minutes.
  2. Adding & sending CAAC appraisals.
  3. Browsing information on CAAC & CA's; CAAC meeting agendas & published appraisals; and recent planning applications.
  4. Keeping application watch-lists.
  5. Sharing watch-lists as a group.

How this can help your CAAC

  1. As a registered user you can receive weekly email alerts for planning applications in your CAAC, as soon as they are published by RBK - you will no longer need to manually search through full listings.

  2. Your CAAC meeting agenda is created for you - this can save your chair or secretary a lot of unnecessary admin work.

  3. Your meeting minutes can be added & filed - minutes remain visible to any CAAC member, but not the public, unless you choose to publish them to RBK.

  4. Your appraisal forms are generated for you, just enter the text.

  5. Your appraisals can be published direct to RBK by email - members can see what was published & when.

  6. Your appraisals can be filed and accessed later - anyone can view past CAAC appraisals & compare with planning decisions which are also uploaded daily.

  7. You can use an official chair email account with Email Forwarding (see below) - a chairman no longer needs to have their personal email published on the Council website; the job of operating the email account is no longer tied to the chairman and can be given to someone else, if desired.

Email Forwarding

We have email forwarding configured as follows: