Local planning authorities are under pressure from three directions at once: growing site assessment backlogs, disconnected data and tools, and the need to harmonise services and evidence bases through Local Government Reorganisation (LGR).

Join planning and digital leads from Nottingham City Council, West Oxfordshire District Council and Cotswold District Council, with LANDCLAN and Esri UK, to see how digital land workflows built on ArcGIS are changing how councils gather Local Plan evidence.

Drawing on the MHCLG PropTech Innovation Fund project featured in the Local Digital case study, this session goes from frontline problems to working solutions: a 93% reduction in the end-to-end site assessment process, and proactive identification of development opportunities for the SHLAA.

What we’ll cover

• Streamlining Call for Sites and site assessment (West Oxfordshire District Council and Cotswold District Council). How automated constraints screening and shareable site cards removed manual PDF digitisation, cut desktop assessment from 10 weeks to 1 week, and let a single officer run a process that previously needed several.
• Proactive site identification and the SHLAA (Nottingham City Council). How Nottingham moved beyond waiting for submissions — using the platform to find, screen and test the development potential of sites across the city, and feed the results directly into its Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment.
• Applying this to LGR and shared services. What these projects show about standardised spatial data models and automated screening, and how consolidating councils can use the same approach to reconcile legacy data, work across former boundaries, and build a single Local Plan evidence base.

Who should attend

Heads of Planning, Planning Policy Officers, GIS Managers and Local Government Digital Transformation Leads.

Read the full MHCLG Local Digital case study ahead of the session: Digital innovation cuts local plan site assessment time by 93%.