City of Edinburgh Council’s ‘Planning and Building Standards Portal’ has been unavailable since Friday, and there’s currently no firm indication of when it will be fixed.
A CEC spokesperson told Spurtle today that solving the unspecified technical problem had been given the highest profile.
CGI – the Council’s ICT providers – are working 24 hours a day on the issue, and ‘hope’ to have the portal up and running again by tomorrow.
Not saving time online
The solution apparently involves providing a more stable and reliable platform for all the Council’s online services, even though it is only the portal which has been experiencing such serious problems.
The CEC spokesperson said that extensions to Planning deadlines were likely to be granted to take account of the online system’s failure. This will come as a relief to those Spurtleshire residents awaiting Royal Bank of Scotland’s application for the Dundas St/Fettes Row/Eyre Place site, and intending to use every available moment to marshal their arguments and mobilise public opinion.
No surprise to regular users
This is, by any standards, a massive IT cock-up, but it comes as no surprise. The system has crashed or run too slowly for practical purposes on many occasions over the last year, particularly when large numbers of people have tried to access a single application simultaneously.
Where there has been extraordinary public interest in a high-profile case, such as the old Royal High School, problems may be understandable if not exactly forgivable. But given that the gremlins have also frequently affected obscurer cases such as the application for a new apartment block on McDonald Place, it is obvious that the system has not been fit for purpose for ages.
It seems extraordinary that it has taken a catastrophic malfunction to trigger improvements. Someone in East Market Street really should have seen this coming.
Update (4 July 2016): on the blink again
The problems we believed had been fixed last Thursday (see comments thread below) were not, and the Council's Planning and Building Standards Portal is once again not working.
A CEC statement issued this morning reads:
Please be advised that we are still experiencing ICT problems following on from council-wide data migration exercise.
The planning landing page information note on the Council website has been updated to show this text:
The Planning & Building Standards Portal and Building Standards Online Warrant Services are not available. Our IT provider is working to resolve this issue as a priority. Planning applications affected by this will be allocated additional time for comment
We are working closely with ICT colleagues to implement a workaround to minimise the impact on our services users.
We should hopefully have these lists issued by tomorrow afternoon.
Update (8 July): fixed
The Planning Portal has now been operating smoothly for the last three days, and this morning we noticed the announcement below.
Got a view? Tell us at spurtle@hotmail.co.uk and @theSpurtle and Facebook
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Candia Dinshaw grim
Paul Burgess Typical
Cockburn Association as I prepare for tomorrow's hearing on the proposals for King's Stables Road I am frustrated that the planning portal is still down... a week on from last Friday. Many members, and others, have contacted us regarding a host of planning applications across the city and we are currently unable to look at them. It is common practice to extend the deadline for commenting on applications when the portal is down but this is going on for too long. Updates as we receive them...
so @planningedin portal *still* off line today. Total #farce. @edinhelp @theSpurtle @ArchHist
Alastair Wright Can they do nothing right?
@theSpurtle@konishigaffney@thecockburn well the planning portal does seem finally to be alive again
Laura Smith I think it's a wider problem with CEC's IT systems - schools have been without Internet access and library system out of order too...
Paul Foley Good ole public sector at its bestest.
Broughton Spurtle Portal came back online at around 5pm this evening (Thursday). Time will tell how robust it now is.