Planning applications delayed after cyber incident

Tewkesbury Borough Council say their backlog has drastically increased after weeks of downtime

Planning applications are facing delays as a council recovers from a cyber incident.

Tewkesbury Borough Council temporarily shut down all of its online services on 4 September after identifying an issue with their IT systems before restarting them on 24 September on the advice of cyber security experts.

In a report, the council said that the new backlog mainly consists of "cases which would otherwise have been determined within their statutory determination period" but could now expire before they can be processed.

They are working to streamline their processes to clear the backlog and ensure that fewer applications get sent to the committee stage.

Before the incident, the authority had an estimated 238 outstanding applications mainly consisting of applications that were "held up for planning reasons such as amendments."

They expect the new total to rise to around 390, which the council believes will add to "existing pressures on officer workloads and impact the customer experience."

The council shut down its own IT services and declared a major incident after unknown user accounts were found on it's systems.

It had been feared that this was a sign of an external attack but this was proved to be untrue and experts have assured them that all IT systems are safe and that no personal data was lost as a result of the incident.

No other districts were affected by the issues.