A business case study for the Environmental information system for planners (EISP) : prepared under Memorandum of Understanding for the Department for Communities and Local Government

This report forms the deliverable for work led by the British Geological Survey (BGS) under a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) between 1st April 2007 and 31st October 2007. This work (Phase III) followed on from six years research effort (jointly funded by the Natural Environment Research Council URGENT Programme investment of £357,000 and the former Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, ODPM, investment of £347,000) (Phases I and II) in the development of an Environmental Information System for Planners (EISP). 2. Learning from the technically similar ODPM funded PARSOL-developed expert system, the costs of building production systems within a local planning authority are estimated. The availability and reasonable cost of nationally collated environmental datasets required to populate production EISPs, alongside the local authority provided data, are confirmed. The ‘off the shelf’ annual average cost to an individual Local Planning Authority considering to purchase and licence the data for such a production system is estimated at between £13,300 and £36,000 which compares well with other such types of IT systems purchased by LPAs in recent years. 3. Benefits to local authorities in using appropriate planning tools in EISP to implement DCLG environmental planning policies are estimated in terms of time and cost savings and actual extra environmental hazard costs avoided. Actual planning officer staff time saved using an EISP is estimated and costed and compared with the acquisition cost of such a commercially available production system. The saving is extremely conservatively estimated at £200,000 per year. This gives a conservative Benefit over Cost ratio of between 5.6-15 using staff time saving criteria alone. 4. A PARSOL-involved sample of local authorities, which were introduced to the likely costs and benefits of installing an EISP, concluded that it was definitely a worthwhile enhancement to eplanning. 5. Telford and Wrekin Council have offered to install a production EISP in 2008/9 with its technology consortium, if this can be funded by DCLG, as with the PARSOL expert systems. That system will be promoted throughout all the LPAs as the ‘Beacon’ system of best practice for Environmental Information Systems in Planning. 6. DCLG is recommended to fund the installation of one or two production EISP systems. One would be with the Telford and Wrekin Council system. The second would be with a local authority currently using CAP Solutions Uni-form planning system (basic e-planning infrastructure already installed in over 50% of English LPAs). These are costed at approximately £300,000 for the first system and £150,000 for the second.