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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 planning and housing data that is easy to find, use and trust.

We work in 3-month cycles and we aim to update this roadmap every month. 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 17 July 2024.

Local planning authorities (LPAs)

We’re working with 71 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.

Now

  • We’ve onboarded 43 more LPAs and run regular drop-in sessions and working groups to address challenges, blockers and opportunities

Next

  • We will work to partner with further LPAs.

Data

We are designing and collecting data that is valuable to housing and planning, and improving the quantity and quality 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. You can take a look at data standards we’re working on now.

Next

You can take a look at data standards 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 scaling our data processing to support many more organisations and much larger datasets, remaining performant throughout. This includes increasing the number of title boundaries from covering 25 to 311 local planning authorities. We will determine and implement alerts for the most important functions of the data pipeline.

We are improving the quality of datasets on the platform, reducing the number of data issues across all datasets and monitoring the number of stale endpoints across the platform. We will reduce operational bottlenecks when managing data, in readiness for local planning authorities providing more datasets sooner. We will enable the assessment of land use by testing an approach for seeding the largest known collection of national planning datasets.

We will help local planning authorities understand issues with the datasets they’ve provided, and guide and support them through the process of fixing these, to increase the quality of the data provided and the number of datasets conforming to the standards. We will do this through our service for data providers.

Next

  • We will create a statutory instrument for our policy areas and considerations
  • 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