City of London Corporation has tested an email processing automation aimed at improving the handling of responses in public planning consultations.
It has partnered with the Digital Planning team in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) on the project, aimed at reducing the time and labour involved in the process.
They developed a solution that automates the response processing using the Power Automate add-on on Microsoft 365 to create a database with the respondent’s name and email address, a subject line, body text and attachments in SharePoint. It also made it possible to categorise and store email submissions without any manual data entry.
Responses can be accessed in the designated folder and analysed to assess feedback, generate reports and make decisions based on the data.
The consultation dealt with responses to the corporation’s City Plan 2040, which received around 2,000 comments – 87% by email – from almost 300 people.
Big time savings
Digital Planning said the project showed the solution can save one to two months of administration per consultation, and that is compatible with various IT systems used by local planning authorities.
Michele Rowland, City of London’s planning policy officer, said: “The programme worked well for us, saving us hours of manual data entry in one step of the representation processing. Instead of painstakingly inputting emails, names, and relevant details by hand, the programme automated the entire process.
“From the spreadsheet export, we were easily able to add additional columns for summarising and analysing the comments.”
The automation is now available for other authorities, with an introduction and guides on how to install it and access and export data, and Digital Planning said it is open to feedback and suggestions for improvement.
