IN Brief:
- Durham reduced the time needed to assess development sites by more than half.
- PlaceMaker consolidated GIS, research, spreadsheets, and assessment records into one workflow.
- Officers retained responsibility for reviewing outputs and applying local planning judgement.
Durham County Council has reduced development-site assessment time by more than 50% during a pilot using PlaceMaker, the digital local-plan platform developed by Urban Intelligence.
After replacing a series of spreadsheet-based, research, GIS, and manual data-handling processes with a shared digital workflow, the council also identified estimated annual operational savings of £10,403.
The project formed part of the fourth round of the government’s PropTech Innovation Fund and was originally tested during 2024. Its results have now been published as a case study for authorities considering digital approaches to local-plan evidence and development-site assessment.
Before the pilot, Durham’s assessments required information to move between several teams, tools, and documents. Officers combined GIS analysis, research, spreadsheets, and manual data entry, creating repeated handovers and making it harder to update large groups of sites consistently as evidence changed.
The council transferred its Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment data into PlaceMaker and helped develop a standardised Housing and Economic Land Availability Assessment database structure. Other councils using the platform can now adopt the same structure.
Through a common set of criteria, officers assessed sites, recorded findings consistently, updated assumptions, and reused data at later stages. Planning, GIS, and specialist teams were also able to review information in one location rather than maintaining separate working versions.
Durham reported that the greatest savings came from removing duplicated information gathering and repeated manual updates. Data validation and production of final outputs were also completed more quickly, allowing officers to devote more time to reviewing results.
Digital workflow retains professional judgement
Officer review remained part of the process throughout the pilot. PlaceMaker supported the organisation and assessment of evidence, while local knowledge and professional judgement were still needed to interpret constraints, deliverability, policy considerations, and the relative merits of individual sites.
As planning authorities increase their use of automated screening and scoring, the distinction between processing and judgement becomes increasingly important. A platform can apply common criteria across thousands of parcels more consistently than disconnected spreadsheets, but the result still depends on the quality of the data, thresholds, assumptions, and scenarios configured by the authority.
Incomplete or outdated information can produce an apparently precise output that does not reflect current site conditions. Flood risk, ecology, access, infrastructure capacity, land ownership, contamination, heritage constraints, and viability may all change, while some issues only emerge through specialist study or direct engagement.
A digital system therefore needs a clear audit trail showing which evidence was used, when it was updated, how a score was produced, and where professional judgement altered or qualified the output. That transparency becomes particularly important during consultation, examination, and any challenge to the evidence supporting a local plan.
Durham has since run a fully digital call for sites through the platform, receiving more than 800 submissions directly into the system. The process removed the need for officers to plot each submission manually and allowed earlier filtering against configured assessment criteria.
Direct submission can reduce administrative work, although quality controls remain necessary. Site boundaries may overlap, ownership details can be incomplete, promoters may use different assumptions, and duplicate or speculative proposals need to be identified before entering the main evidence base.
Standardised structures also create opportunities for cooperation between neighbouring authorities because housing markets, employment areas, transport corridors, water systems, and ecological networks extend beyond administrative boundaries. Shared data can support cross-boundary analysis where councils agree how criteria and assumptions will be applied.
Planning departments continue to face pressure to update local plans while managing live applications and limited specialist capacity. Reducing repetitive data handling releases time for site visits, policy judgement, infrastructure coordination, viability work, and public engagement — activities that remain difficult to automate.
The benefits will depend on whether the platform is integrated with the council’s wider planning and geographic information systems. Re-entering data between applications, evidence documents, consultation tools, and reporting platforms would reintroduce some of the inefficiency the pilot was intended to remove.
Long-term governance will also be required around data ownership, access permissions, version control, and maintenance. A shared digital evidence base becomes less useful when updates are irregular or responsibility for individual datasets is unclear.
Durham intends to embed the digital approach as work on its new local plan continues. Later stages will test whether structured assessment data can move efficiently into reports, evidence publication, consultation, and future plan reviews without returning to separate manual processes.
The measured reduction in assessment time provides a strong operational baseline. Continued value will depend on whether the evidence remains current, explainable, and trusted as development options move from initial screening towards policy allocation and delivery.
