Open Digital Planning: Month 5
October 2025 — Digital Planning Improvement Fund — Cohort 3
The team is feeling energised this month, fresh from the Open Digital Planning (ODP) camp at Medway. It was a brilliant opportunity for various members of our team to interact, network, and dive deep into shared issues and ideas with peers from some of the other 57 councils that attended.
We’ve come away with valuable insights and new connections that we’re keen to build on. These discussions are vital for finding ways to improve not just our own ODP project, but also how we approach Planning more generally.
Continuing the Momentum
That camp-inspired energy has fed directly back into our project work. The team has made great progress on cleansing our core datasets and, excitingly, we’re starting to expand our transformation work, beginning to explore and scope out improvements to wider planning processes.
Our Wins for October
- Tackling TPO Data: We held a very productive meeting with our Tree Officer and our LLPG Custodian. We presented the TPO data issues we’ve identified, discussed the complexities, and began mapping out possible solutions together.
- New Scanning Process Live: We’ve successfully rolled out our new mobile scanning process! The team is now equipped with the Adobe Scan app on new mobiles and tablets, allowing us to finally start digitising paper records that aren’t currently stored digitally. We designed and tested the process thoroughly before making it live.
- Listed Buildings Scoping: Work on the Listed Buildings dataset has officially begun. We’ve reviewed several key documents and consulted with HM Land Registry (HMLR) on the best approach for mapping and documenting these assets. The team is now checking our data against the ODP criteria and scoping the full extent of the work.
Navigating the Challenges
In the spirit of working openly, it’s important to share the challenges we’re navigating. As we get deeper into the data, we’re uncovering new and hidden issues that need solving.
- Complex Data Issues: We’ve hit some unforeseen data complexities with our Tree Preservation Orders (TPOs), particularly around how to handle a single TPO that covers multiple locations and UPRNs. This has required clarification and decisions from the wider team, and discussions on how to fix it are ongoing.
- Staff Availability: Decreased staff availability across the team this month impacted the time we could dedicate to the Article 4 work. To manage this, we made the practical decision to push back the dataset upload by one week.
- Managing Dependencies: We’re continuing to navigate the same challenges as last month around dependencies on various departments and processes (both technical and procedural). This can sometimes slow progress, but the team is actively managing these relationships.
Looking Ahead
Our focus for November is clear. We will be working on:
- Holding a transformation workshop with the Planning Policy team to review one of their processes from end to end — most likely starting with the monitoring of housing.
- Completing the Article 4 dataset upload.
- Preparing for and taking part in the November ODP show and tell to showcase our progress.
- Continuing to make progress on the Listed Building dataset cleansing process.
- Awaiting the response from Extract AI on the TPO samples we provided.
- Continuing the data cleansing of our TPO records.
- Continuing our transformation discovery work.
- New Priority: We’re also beginning adjacent work related to the new Building Safety Levy. The resource and team capacity for this overlaps with our ODP work, so this will need to be managed carefully going forward.
We are learning and adapting as we go and are excited to share our next update.
