Should the employment module allow unknown employee counts for outline applications?

[colmjude]

The current employment module requires:

• existing-employees
• proposed-employees

Each uses the employees component, which expects full-time, part-time and total FTE counts.

For outline applications, this may be too strict. Employment numbers may not yet be known in enough detail to provide reliable counts. In those cases, forcing numeric values may create misleading data, for example entering 0 when the real answer is unknown.

Other parts of the specification already allow an unknown answer for outline applications where detail may not yet be settled, for example some floorspace, waste and rights-of-way questions. We should check whether employment needs a similar pattern.

Questions for feedback:

• Do applicants commonly know existing and proposed employee counts at outline application stage?
• Are there proposal types where unknown employment numbers should be allowed?
• How do planning officers currently use employment numbers from outline applications?

If there is evidence this need exists, the next step would be to draft a small proposal for updating the employment module for outline applications.

[colmjude]

Evidence

This comment is for collecting examples where an explicit unknown answer may have been needed for employment numbers in an outline application.

Known examples so far:

Application	Application type	Evidence	Why it matters
Hackney 2011/0734	outline-some	Section 19, "Employment", has 0 values in the employment table, but also a handwritten UNKNOWN note.	Suggests the applicant or agent may have meant "unknown", but the form structure pushed the answer into a numeric table.

This list is not enough evidence on its own to change the module yet.
It is a place to build the evidence base for whether outline applications need an explicit way to say employment numbers are unknown.

[James-Planningportal]

Existing employees at time of application is a known quantity (even if 0), but could understand if proposed was not.