Reforming planning technology: the key to unlocking growth

Reform of the planning system is one of the key priorities for the Government. In a speech on her vision for economic growth, Chancellor Rachel Reeves reiterated the Government’s priorities for the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. These include a commitment to “rapidly streamline the process for determining applications” and “to make the consultation process far less burdensome”.

While many Britons have little day-to-day interaction with the planning system, there is a common understanding that it is slow, bureaucratic, and ultimately holding back innovation and growth.

Beyond policy: the role of technology in planning reform

The finger is often pointed at policy as the solution—framing the issue as a matter of “tackling red tape.” However, the tools and processes that planners rely on to do their jobs are outdated, and improving them is just as crucial. While this may not be as headline-grabbing, modernising these systems is essential for creating better communities, supporting businesses, and ensuring that developments are fair, legal, and environmentally responsible.

Planners - highly skilled public servants - are best placed to drive the changes that the Chancellor is calling for. While policy levers are important, they must be paired with modern, efficient digital tools to deliver the reforms that the Government seeks.

Unlocking Data to Improve Planning

Improving the tools and processes used in planning also enables better policymaking. Currently, data about what is and isn’t being approved is locked away in PDFs, collected expensively after the fact, or entirely absent. To build smarter, use land more effectively, and find mutually beneficial outcomes for developers and communities, we need to leverage data more efficiently. Automating data collection and reporting through better tools is the only way to achieve this.

Work to deliver this future is already underway. Over the last few years, we’ve been collaborating with planning officers, councils, and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to redesign back-office planning systems—the technology that planning officers use to assess and determine applications.

The aims of this programme are to:

• Reduce the burden of slow and unreliable systems on planning officers.
• Free up time for planners to focus on broader outcomes for economic growth.
• Embed a data-driven future for planning, unlocking the potential for ambitious policy reform.

Despite the clear benefits, achieving this future has required significant effort. One of the challenges is the landscape of local government, where software is often repurposed across different domains with little user input in its design or improvement.

• Certainty is prioritised - even if the systems in place are frustrating or underwhelming.
• Councils that want to innovate are often deterred by the cost, risk, and cultural challenges of building something new.
• Stretched resources make it difficult to justify the investment needed for digital transformation.

The Open Digital Planning Programme

Through this programme, trailblazing councils are now piloting live services using their new back-office systems. MHCLG’s progressive approach to the Open Digital Planning transformation programme has been essential to accelerating the delivery of a modern planning system for three reasons:

1. Overcoming Cost Barriers with Smarter Funding and Collaboration

• Sustained central government funding has been critical in facilitating change and experimentation.
• Funding has been awarded to coalitions of councils, fostering a shared mindset of improvement and learning—the ‘test and learn’ culture now being promoted across government.
• MHCLG has played a key role in establishing standardised data sets, something that would be difficult for an individual council or provider to achieve alone.
• Legislative changes have supported the opening and standardisation of data across both new and existing systems.

Council services are stretched, and funding has been needed to free up planners’ time to contribute to the development of the tools they’ll be using in the future. Yet, long-term sustainability remains a challenge, and central government has helped by bringing in commercial and legal expertise to guide the programme.

2. Working at Scale to Drive Adoption

• Fixing one council at a time is too slow and doesn’t guarantee scalability.
• Instead of replicating existing processes from one place, this programme has required a deep understanding of common needs to build tools that work efficiently across multiple councils.
• While some solutions have come from central government, it has been local government and planning experts who have ensured that the tools developed are grounded in the real needs of planners, managers, residents, and professionals.

3. Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Collaboration

• It is often difficult to be ambitious about new service models in local government. Many councils are forced to rearrange service delivery rather than reimagine it, particularly as budgets shrink.
• By embedding digital professionals directly into product teams, planners are now able to think beyond the limitations of their current systems.
• The approach has been to design ‘with’ and not ‘for’—building confidence in digital transformation within the planning community.
• Though this required patience initially, it has now unlocked an exponential increase in capability, with a growing community of planners and product experts shaping the tools of the future.

Lessons for Wider Government Transformation

What can we learn from this experience for broader government transformation?

• Reform cannot be achieved through policy alone - it requires a rigorous transformation of processes and tools.
• Transformation needs to address both the ‘what’ (policy) and the ‘how’ (planning services).
• National and local government must work together, with an understanding that innovation needs to be culturally embedded across all levels.
• Funding must be structured to support long-term change, rather than short-term fixes.
• Encouraging new thinking is crucial - government should reward questions and proposals rather than shutting down new ideas.

There is a huge resource of expertise and problem-solving ability within local government, and it must be enabled through the right funding and support.

Ultimately, if you want to transform a service, you need to transform the organisations delivering it - and if you want to transform organisations, you need to empower the people within them.

This experience has shown that with careful investment and collaboration, large-scale government transformation is not just possible - it is essential for driving growth and innovation.