Skip guidance navigation

Roadmap

A list of things we are working on now and next for the Planning Data Platform.

This roadmap shows our current plans for making it easier to find, use and trust planning and housing data.

We work in 3-month cycles and we aim to update this roadmap every 3 months. Our plans can change based on what we learn from speaking to our users, testing iterations, and how we can better deliver on our mission.

Last updated 4 October 2024.

Local planning authorities (LPAs)

We’re working with 73 LPAs through the Open Digital Planning community to help them provide data through our platform, so they can use the PlanX and BoPS digital planning products.

We’re encouraging all LPAs in England to provide planning and housing data.

Data

We are designing and collecting data that is valuable to housing and planning, and improving the quantity of data on the platform.

We regularly ask our community to help us decide the things we need to work on and tell us what they need from the data. Read our code of conduct to see how you can contribute.

Now

We are working with LPA partners to provide data for these areas:

We are improving the visibility, participation and robustness of the data design process. We are also taking more data specifications related to local planning through our design process. You can take a look at data specifications we’re working on now.

Next

You can take a look at data specifications emerging as priorities, based on department objectives and our analysis of what will add the most value.

We will research how easy the platform is for data consumers and planning policymakers to use, so that we can understand how the platform is being used currently and how well it meets their needs.

Platform

Now

We are making it possible to rebuild our data quickly and reliably, in hours not days. We are also increasing the number of title boundaries available on the platform after scaling our infrastructure. We have been making performance improvements to our API and will continue to work on the highest priority issues experienced by applications.

We will develop a framework so that we can show the quality and trustworthiness of data on the platform, including how it improves over time. We will reduce operational bottlenecks when managing data, and continue to add datasets to the platform quickly. We will also focus on updating the brownfield land data available on the platform.

We will increase the range of datasets that local planning authorities can check and provide to the platform. We will also help local planning authorities understand and act on issues with the datasets they’ve provided. We will do this through our service for data providers.

Next

  • We will draft a template Statutory Instrument for potential data standards
  • We will explain the principles that guide us in making planning and housing data easy to find at a national scale
  • We will explain our quality-checking processes and the development stages for certain datasets, making what we do transparent so that the data is easier to trust
  • We will work with data consumers to iterate our API, supporting a growing market of planning products and services using open data we make available

Later

  • We will explore alternative options for warehousing reporting data to make it cheaper to run the platform
  • We will investigate how we might filter geographical features outside of the organisation boundary
  • We will make users more aware of how their data is benefitting other people and organisations
  • We will explore better ways of searching and finding documents on the site