Two new funding allocations have been announced for local authorities working on digital planning and property technology projects.
The money will be shared out under the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ (DLUHC) Digital Planning Programme, divided between round two of the Digital Planning Improvement Fund and round four of the PropTech Innovation Fund.
Under the first group, 43 local planning authorities (LPAs) will receive £100,000 each to support the adoption of new practices with planning data, digital capabilities and development management software.
Each will be expected to join the Open Digital Planning group for peer support, self-assess the digital maturity of planning service and develop an action plan to improve the maturity over time. They will also have to improve spatial datasets on conservation areas, listed buildings, tree preservation order and Article 4 directions and publish them on the Planning Data Platform.
Allocations under the PropTech Innovation Fund will support 37 projects involving 49 LPAs to work on digital solutions for land assessment and digital citizen engagement through visualising planning proposals.
Use cases
The projects will cover a range of use cases such as local plan making, capacity and constraints modelling, strategic housing or economic land availability, and biodiversity net gain.
No details have been made public on the funding for each project, but the prospectus published last year for the round indicted it cold go up to £85,000 for local authorities working individually and £225,000 for joint ventures.
In a blogpost on the allocations, the DLUHC digital planning team commented: “The LPA work we’re funding aligns with our vision of enabling a modern and efficient planning system in England, shifting a documents based system to one that is data driven, standards based and powered by modern user centred products and services.”
