Sutton Living Streets

Planning Alerts is a free service that sends you email notices about planning applications near you.

This is easier than hunting through the council’s website as that information is not grouped by locality, so you have to hunt through the entire borough’s applications to find ones near you.

Planning Alerts works for many boroughs, currently including Sutton and Croydon, but not Merton.

If you use an RSS reader, this information is also available as an RSS feed.

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I’ve long considered that Transport for London’s street fault reporting system is a wonderful example of how to discourage public participation through bad design.

By filling out a form on TfL’s website or phoning their call centre, you can let them know about a street problem that needs to be fixed. The hope and expectation is that they’ll do so with appropriate haste and keep you informed as they do so.

One of its fundamental flaws is that if the reporter wants to track the progress of the fault, they must keep returning to the website and enter the lengthy fault code to see its status. If someone has gone to the trouble of reporting a fault, it’s likely that they care about it getting fixed. Providing a simple mechanism for keeping the reporter notified without making them do any extra work is the least the system should do as a “reward” for the reporter’s efforts. As Lynne Truss would say, “Why am I the One Doing This?”

I can think of four ways to notify the reporter when a fault’s status changes; two that are obvious, two less so.

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