Hampshire County Council launches new developer portal

Hampshire County Council has gone live with a new first of type portal for developers, provided by DEF Software.

The portal is a hub that sits on Hampshire County Council’s website allowing developers and their consultants to submit a complete Section 278 or 38 submission for design checking. Through the portal, drawings and documents in relation to the Section 278/38 designs can be submitted, and audit reports posted back to the developer/consultant; the local authority can also be messaged directly about the application and can respond with all parties involved in the application being able to see the messages, responses, documents, reports and scheme progression.

This means that both the local authority, developer and developer’s consultant have a completely up to date view of progress in one central place.

It is accessed by the developer and their consultant through the local authority website. Whenever they use it to submit a document or send a message, all files submitted to the Highways department at Hampshire are automatically uploaded to its existing MasterGov platform, also supplied by DEF, where it can be viewed by all officers involved with the approval.

‘Our priority with this project was to minimise the unnecessary administration for the team and to improve our service for developers, and to do that we needed a system where the latest version of a document or action is tracked, and everybody has sight of it and we’re all seeing the same thing,’ said Hampshire County Council’s group engineer, Kathie Murray.

‘We’re really pleased with the portal, which is easily accessible, and it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the process, and working with DEF has been a completely collaborative process. We look forward to seeing the benefits this portal will bring to Hampshire’s staff and customers.’

Graeme Cooke, commercial director at DEF Software added: ‘An important part of what we do here at DEF is to work closely with our customers and find solutions to any problems they have. It was a pleasure to work in collaboration with Hampshire to improve its service and create a solution that no doubt other councils will find useful.’