Digital Planning
‘The Future of Planning’ / Part 3
Over the last two decades the web has transformed the way we do almost everything in our lives, from banking to buying insurance to booking holidays. And thanks to the work of the Government Digital Service (GDS) and others, it has also now improved many aspects of how we interact with government too. This has raised people’s expectations. Today, people expect government to be digital-by-default. Where once we might have tolerated complex, opaque bureaucracy, people now expect user-friendly web-based services that are simple, accessible, transparent and guide you through the process, and that you can complete in a few minutes on your phone if you want to.
Planning services today are... not that.
Again, this really isn’t anyone’s fault. Ultimately it is a function of the fact that the planning system was conceived long before personal computers or the web. Its operating system was paper. Its interfaces were forms.
Its creators therefore held a series of assumptions about what planning work looks like — specifically knowledge work. They simply took it for granted that information has to be encoded into plans, policies and long documents that have to be manually drafted, parsed and assessed by urban designers, who in turn then produce drawings, forms and reports that have to be laboriously parsed and assessed by planners. Essentially, planning officers had to be human computers, holding planning policies in their heads, and testing each case against them.
Today, those documents have moved from paper to PDFs, but the basic anatomy of the system hasn’t really changed that much.
This means that even a relatively simple project like adding a heat pump to a home — which is a national policy goal — is prohibitively difficult to do. It requires navigating a labyrinth of different websites, legislation, maps and policy documents, then producing various drawings and reports, usually procured at great expense from a consultant.
Worse still, with planning, you don’t know what you don’t know. Most people have never heard of ‘planning conditions’ or ‘Article 4 directions’, and they won’t be aware of the various pieces of case law that define the answers to such arcane questions as which side of a house is the front?
For non-experts this turns the planning journey from a labyrinth into a minefield. Miss just one piece of critical information, and you could find yourself having wasted thousands of pounds.
As the planning system has become more complex (and arguably, more evidence-driven, which is not a bad thing) this has only got harder. Research by Lichfields found that a typical outline planning application in 1990 required only 4 documents of evidence, costing about £28,000 to prepare, but today would require 43, and cost around £125,000.
Clearly, this exerts a huge deadweight cost on businesses, on the economy, and on our ability to achieve strategic social goals. But it is also, in very practical ways, structurally un-democratic, because it means ordinary families, community organisations and small businesses are at a huge disadvantage. In order to navigate the planning system successfully, you need to either be very knowledgeable, or very rich, or both.
This burden doesn’t just fall onto citizens and businesses. It also falls onto planning authorities. When we first started working with planning authorities we were astounded to be told by one council that 70% of the phone calls they received in any given week were to ask the same question: ‘Do I need planning permission to replace my windows?’ Similarly, authority after authority told us that more than half of all planning applications were marked ‘invalid’ upon receipt. That’s to say they have to be sent back before they can even be assessed. Often, the reasons for this are incredibly banal, like the site being outlined in the wrong colour on a plan, or the plan missing a north arrow. But each time this happens, it causes a delay of 38 days, on average.
If you spend a day following a planning officer around, you quickly realise that very little of their time is spent doing anything you might call planning. Instead, their day is spent answering emails, requesting more information, fixing problems, dealing with failure demand, doing data entry for reporting, or reading through long, expensive reports prepared by consultants, “most of which is just our own stuff regurgitated back at us”.
The conventional response to this is to ‘cut the red’ tape. But that too, of course, has a cost. It’s that same, age-old binary choice: weakening regulations or weakening the economy.
This is where the web steps-in to help. It reframes that dilemma. It rejects that choice.
What the web allows us to do is to move from a world of documents to a world of data. That might sound pretty dull, but it has exciting implications. It allows us to make information much easier to find and use; and it allows us to make complex rules much, much simpler to navigate.
For example, it means you no longer need to know whether your property is in a Conservation Area, or even what a Conservation Area is and that that is a thing you need to look-up. Instead you can just enter your property address and that information will come to you. It means you can check if the information in your application is correct before you submit it. It means you don’t have to know to add a north arrow to your location plan drawing — in fact you don’t need to provide a location plan at all, you can just confirm the outline of your site on a digital map.
Most powerfully of all, it allows us to create online digital services that have all those complex planning rules and guidance baked into them. So you no longer need to be an expert.
Over the last few years, Open Systems Lab has been working with a growing group of local planning authorities and the Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities to build some of those tools. In particular, we’ve been developing Plan✕, an open source platform that allows planning authorities to collaboratively build these services by writing planning rules and guidance as machine-readable code (‘Rules as Code’ or RaC).
Turning planning rules into code might sound esoteric, but it’s actually the opposite. It means that instead of services that are structured around the bureaucracy of the system and what it needs (which the user then has to learn), we can instead create services that are structured around the user, and what they need. You can then create additional in-person services for those who are less at home with digital technology.
One of the first services we created with planning authorities using Plan✕ was called ‘Find out if you need planning permission’. It does exactly what you think it does. It lets you find out the answer to a question like ‘do I need planning permission to change my windows?’ on your phone in about two minutes.
Plan✕ is just one part of a whole ecosystem of open source public digital tools being developed as part of the Open Digital Planning project to make planning simpler, faster, more accessible, more transparent, less expensive, and to reduce the burden on planning authorities.
But for this digital planning ecosystem to work, there are two critical things that are needed.
The first is data. For example, Plan✕ services can only tell you whether your property is in a Conservation Area because it can fetch that data from planning.data.gov.uk. That in turn is made possible because someone in that council has carefully mapped that information as GIS data, and published it. In other words, that magically simple user experience is only possible because of two layers of data infrastructure, and skilled teams behind the scenes doing the hard work to make it simple.
That data needs to be able to move. Every separate piece of software in system needs to have an API (basically a machine-to-machine interface that allows two software applications to talk to each other) so that data can move freely to where it’s needed.
So, for example, data might need to move between different digital tools, or different departments within a council, or different parts of government or — most obviously — between government and members of the public.
Making data open and available is one of the most powerful things a government can do to make stuff work better, and to encourage innovation. But it takes work, collaboration, investment and political leadership.
Let’s take another practical example of the importance of this. If I asked you to think of one set of planning data that government should publish openly, the first one to pop into your head might be ‘up-to-date information about planning applications and decisions’. You would think there would be a nationwide register with an API from which you can fetch this data, be notified about planning applications (in your area or nationwide) track the status of a planning application. It would also allow ministers, researchers, infrastructure planners or businesses to build dashboards showing what’s being built and where. It would save local authorities thousands of hours of plugging numbers into spreadsheets or responding to email requests (every year, councils get thousands of emails just asking ‘What’s the status of my planning application?’). It would be a foundational piece of data infrastructure that would allow the whole system to work better.
And yet today, no such data infrastructure exists (although lots of work has already begun around data standards).
Sometimes the barriers to making this data available aren’t just about lack of digital infrastructure. Sometimes it’s information being stuck in filing cabinets, or in old, offline software. Often it’s also to do with commercial vested interests. For example, existing software suppliers might benefit from it being difficult for councils to switch to a competitor (a phenomenon called ‘vendor lock-in’), or companies might make money from selling data, which would be hard to do if that data became available to everyone for free. Again, these aren’t bad people — it’s just incentives.
So to really unlock digital innovation in planning, and to create a fully functioning digital planning ecosystem, governments need to be brave and principled, demanding that data must be able to flow freely to where its needed, and investing thoughtfully in the (ultimately inexpensive, but incredibly valuable) work of creating open data infrastructure and open, shared data standards.
The second thing that we need to make ‘rules-as-code’ in planning work is far more obvious. We need, well, rules.
And that’s what I’ll talk about in the next post.
This is Part 3 of a series. The first part is here.
