If you submit planning applications for a living, you already know the routine: the form, the fee, the card payment, the wait. Most architects and planning agents have only ever had one way of doing it online. Planda Portal is the other one, and in October it got meaningfully better in five places!

Submit Welsh planning applications — in Welsh

Wales is now fully supported in Planda Portal: Welsh application types, Welsh fee schedules, and bilingual English/Welsh PDFs, including redacted versions for publication.

If your practice works both sides of the border, you no longer need one process for English authorities and a different one for Welsh. Same account, same wallet, same submission flow.

Pay for credits by bank transfer

Planda Portal also works on a wallet. You put money into your account once, and planning application fees come out of that balance. No card details at the point of submission, no delays!

You can now top up your credits by bank transfer as well: send the payment and your wallet is credited automatically, with a receipt issued without anyone chasing for one.

For a practice submitting several applications a month, this is the difference between one transfer your finance team can reconcile in a minute and a string of card payments to pick apart at month end. And because every application draws down against a visible balance, recharging fees to clients stops being an archaeology exercise.

Two new application routes: Permission in Principle and Prior Approval

You can now submit Permission in Principle (PiP) and Prior Approval for change of use in England through Planda Portal. These were the two most requested additions from users this year.

Permission in Principle is the two-stage consent route for minor housing development - useful when a client wants to establish whether a site is acceptable in principle before committing to a full application. Prior approval for change of use covers the permitted development rights that let a building change use without full planning permission, subject to the authority’s sign-off on specific matters.

Both now sit alongside full planning, householder, listed building consent and the rest of the routes already supported.

How long will validation take? Now you can see an estimate

“When will I hear back?” is the question we’re asked more than any other, and historically nobody could answer it.

Planda Portal now shows a realistic validation time range for your council, based on how that authority has actually handled applications before, with a short guide to what happens at each stage. It’s rolling out gradually over the coming weeks to all of our users.

Validation delays are the quiet killer of project programmes. Knowing that one authority typically takes three weeks and another takes three days changes how you sequence work and what you promise a client.

Faster support when something goes wrong

We’ve made a round of improvements to our internal tools this month, which means our support and operations teams can resolve more issues directly and get back to you faster when something needs sorting out.

Coming next:

Two bigger pieces of work land over the next few months. The first takes Planda beyond submission into finding and researching sites in the first place: everything on the map, in the same account you already submit from. The second gives you somewhere to hold a scheme together before it becomes an application: documents, options and costs in one place, with better support for larger practices working across multiple teams.

Try Planda Portal

If you’ve only ever submitted through one portal, it’s worth seeing what the alternative looks like. Create an account — there’s no subscription, you only pay for what you submit.