Planning and Environmental Appeals Division (DPEA): annual review 2023 to 2024

How We Work

Under the procedures that apply to planning appeals, the reporter will decide what further procedure, if any, is necessary once the grounds of appeal, response by the planning authority and representations by interested parties have been received. For this reason, it is our practice to allocate appeals at an early stage. The reporter considers the submissions made by the various parties to the appeal and decides whether any further procedure is necessary. If a site inspection is to take place the reporter decides whether this will take place on an accompanied or unaccompanied basis. In more complex cases a pre-examination meeting may be held before the reporter takes a final view on how the appeal should be conducted. If hearing or inquiry sessions are needed these will normally be restricted to the issues or matters specified by the reporter.

Each of our cases has a dedicated caseworker responsible for the management of the case’s documentation, issuing letters on behalf of the reporter, and acting as a point of contact for parties to the case.

With development plan examinations it is our practice to appoint a lead reporter who has overall responsibility for the conduct of the examination. Depending on the number of unresolved representations one or more additional reporters may be appointed to assist with the examination.

Websites And Electronic Submissions of Appeals

For information about the work of DPEA, forms for submitting appeals, guidance on procedure, previous annual reviews, how to contact us, how to make a complaint or give feedback please go to our planning and environmental appeals pages on the Scottish Government website. Forms and guidance for submitting appeals are also available at mygov.scot.

We publish most documentation for all cases that we handle on our dedicated casework website, dpea.scotland.gov.uk, and all documentation in live cases is available on the site. The aim of the website is to increase openness and improve the transparency of the appeals process. All papers that are in front of the decision maker are available for all parties or members of the public to view via this website.

There is also a registered user’s option on the website that gives access to the DPEA Portal, this works in much the same way but also allows users to set up alerts for new cases, new documents, new decisions etc. Please refer to our guides on how to use the website and the DPEA Portal, our case file publication protocol, and our policy on publication and data protection.

The proportion of appeals submitted electronically either through the online eDevelopment portal or by email has increased slightly from 94% to 95%.

Case Administration

We use a case administration system, known as the DPEA Portal to record all case details, including the documents associated with each case and parties involved in them. We issued 60,035 emails plus 2,794 letters via the system for the 886 cases being dealt with in 2023 to 2024.

Webcasting And Virtual Meetings

The webcasting of pre-examination meetings, hearings and inquiries has continued in 2023 to 2024. Virtual procedures are now a popular option for holding webcasts with more flexibility and availability to hold virtual procedures ensuring that DPEA processes can proceed at a good pace. We held a number of hybrid inquiries, allowing for parties to appear at in person inquiries remotely, ensuring our procedures are accessible to all.

We provided coverage of procedures in 47 cases. We have had 35,876 visitors to the site who have collectively watched 4,571 hours of webcasts. Live viewings of events remain high as we continue to see a high level of engagement with procedures being webcast.

Webcasting will continue to be an important part of the service provided by the DPEA and we will endeavour to try and cover as many events as possible.

Electronic Working

For several years reporters have been working with electronic files rather than using paper files when dealing with written submissions. This is now the most common practice, that reporters will conduct hearings and inquiries using electronic files. Feedback from reporters in this regard continues to be positive. We will continue to look at ways to ensure that parties attending hearing or inquiry sessions can better follow the proceedings.