How the Digital Planning Directory can promote open and collaborative innovation

By Michael Thomas on January 27, 2025

On the 22nd January, we attended the launch event of the Digital Planning Directory. The directory has been created to support MHCLGs goal of ‘Making the planning system in England fit for the 21st Century’. By raising the visibility and awareness of all the innovative digital services and tools available to improve planning services across the country, the service hopes to support the government’s goal to accelerate housebuilding and deliver 1.5 million homes over this Parliament.

We were thrilled to be awarded a place on the directory, so we wanted to share our thoughts on why we think this will be such a valuable tool for planning teams across the country.

The challenges being faced within planning

Planning is a large and complex area, which involves deciding how to use land, build infrastructure, and create public spaces while balancing a whole range of different interests. To achieve this, it also requires participants to navigate complex processes, governance and regulations, to ensure what gets planned is both compliant and robust.

Within the current planning system, there are a whole range of challenges that users are facing on a day-to-day basis, for example:

• some applicants it can take over 70 hours to prepare and submit planning applications
• 61% of staff reported they don’t have necessary knowledge to identify the right available digital planning tools
• outdated and often paper based methods mean up to 50% of planning officer’s time can be spent on manual processing and dealing with errors*

These kinds of challenges lead to an overall system that is often slow, opaque and deeply inefficient.

There are solutions to many of these problems

Across the industry, people have been seeking to address these problems. A range of services and tools have been developed to address these issues, however only 15% of local authority planning staff said they have the necessary knowledge to source and procure new digital planning tools – and thus implement them into their working practices.

Helping users find innovative solutions

With seed funding from MHCLG, the Digital Task Force for Planning created the Digital Planning Directory – a one-stop shop to help people access state-of-the-art digital planning tools and services to help improve or streamline these processes.

The new directory provides easy access to a host of suppliers for digital planning services and tools, spanning areas such as community engagement, 3D modelling and organisational digital transformation. Each service provider has been through a validation process to ensure the quality of services listed, sharing details of their service offerings and case studies to provide clear understanding and reassurance.

The approach taken greatly enhances transparency and knowledge-sharing, promotes fairer competition and facilitates informed decision-making for those looking to improve their planning services by adopting innovative digital planning tools and services.

How the directory can benefit planning

At the event, we heard from a range of stakeholders outlining their vision for the directory, its benefits and sharing real world examples of how this kind of approach has already been providing return on investment.

Dr Wei Yang, CEO of the Digital Task Force for Planning, outlined their mission of unlocking the full potential of spatial planning by consolidating fragmented knowledge, data and methods, identifying where there are gaps, and developing practical solutions to transform these areas – this is something we’ve seen first hand within planning, but in all kinds of different areas across local authorities, from grantmaking to social care, siloed working regularly leads to fragmented approaches, and the best way to overcome this is to work more openly, transparently and collaboratively – just as this directory is promoting.

We also heard from Bridget Wilkins, Head of Adoption, Engagement and Innovation, MHCLG, who encouraged teams to push to solve the problems they see. We commonly see across our partnerships that both staff and service users often struggle with the services they use, but don’t realise things can be better – they can so often be resigned to the fact that ‘these are the way things have always been, and will always be’ – it’s great to get that reminder that you can, and should, push for change.

Lastly, Mick Dunn of Nottingham City Council shared a fascinating case study of how they’ve been putting innovative approaches and tools into practice. Their council formed strategic partnerships across the commercial, academic and public sector to develop 3D geospatial tools, data and services. They have developed and operationalised a 3D Urban Modelling assessment tool they’d developed to improve engagement throughout the planning process. By providing more realistic visualisation of their planning information, they could significantly increase engagement. They had the added benefit of demonstrating a significant return on investment, in doing so. He went on to highlight how these innovative approaches taken locally by councils could, once proved to be effective, should be able to be expanded nationally, so other authorities can gain the same rewards.

Our own recent discovery project with 3 councils sought to not only understand the challenges being faced by those individual councils, but also validate if those same issues were being faced nationwide. Through engaging with users across the building control space, and across the country, we could validate that that was the case, and the team are now seeking to explore solutions to those challenges that could be rolled out to local authorities across the county – again proving the benefit of Mick’s approach of starting and validating new approach locally, before being able to expand them nationally.

Looking to the future

This is exactly the kind of innovation and collaboration that the digital planning directory is seeking to promote. By working more openly and transparently, pushing for innovative change and starting small and reusing great solutions – rather than reinventing the wheel – the Digital Planning Directory will certainly play a significant role in increasing adoption, delivering efficiencies and making planning fit for England in the 21st century’.

You can go and explore the directory and all the available services and tools at digitalplanningdirectory.org or see more about what Marvell Consulting can help you with here.

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* statistics from Reflections on launch of the Digital Planning Directory, MHCLG Digital Planning – 26 September 2024 and Local authority planning capacity and skills survey: 2023