23 September 2022
Our platform is now in public beta and has a new site
Our platform is now in public beta and has a new site
We announced a new PropTech Engagement Fund, began prototyping our maturity model, introduced our own entity numbers to relate data from different sources, improved how we manage content, and completed the local plans pathfinders project.
The team have begun working with 10 pathfinder local authorities to explore options and test guidance and other tools which may be used to develop new style local plans. We also added more national datasets, and made improvements to how we collect and present data on our national map.
It’s been a busy few weeks at Digital Land during the pre-election period. We’ve been preparing the local plan pathfinders project, revisiting our project and product pages on the site and setting up a view-model for our data. Alongside this, we are continuing to feed into PropTech and policy, as well as evolving how we communicate with our users.
We continued work on Article 4 directions, exploring better ways of giving feedback to people publishing data, collaborated on improving digital planning notices, made a prototype roadmap for our website, and had a spike on our map.
This was a busy sprint for the whole team. Amongst other things, we made some great progress working with Buckinghamshire Council to publish a page per development plan document on our site
A longer sprint which included the Christmas break.
The main focus for this sprint has been to pilot collecting development plan data from 3 local authorities.
The main focus for this sprint has been to get conservation areas onto the site.
The main focus for this sprint has been around building a way to collect conservation areas and speaking with local planning authorities to help test our local plans schema.
A lot has happened over the last few weeks, including a roundtable with Minister Pincher, lots of work on the platform and website, Kishan joining the team, and Emily and Natalie leaving.
This sprint we held a show and tell and Loic played back the recent user research findings.
This sprint we’ve finished our first round of local plans user research into data providers, and we're now speaking with data consumers.
This sprint we’ve listed datasets we want to standardise, researched with more local authorities about their local plan making process, and added a cookie banner to our website.
It’s been a big 2 weeks for the team as the Planning White Paper was published, with lots of content on data and digital.
This sprint we’ve done a lot of work on local plans, and Paul has written guidance on finding the local authority from an address.
This sprint we’ve started the local plans beta phase, improved our platform, and started some exciting policy work.
This sprint we’ve built on our roadmap, published the learnings from the local plans alpha, and had lots of involvement in the PropTech world.
We’re back! After supporting the department’s Covid-19 response, we’re working on Digital Land projects once again and we’ve hit the ground running in this first sprint.
This week we finished our second sprint where we explored what a national picture of plan making could look like, and started our final sprint where we are focussing on how and when local planning authorities should submit their data.
We’re coming to the end of our second sprint.
The right starting point for the standard.
We’ve had a busy start to the project, building up our domain knowledge in a complex area and designing and testing a prototype to get feedback from local authority users.
The planning process is complicated and dynamic.
A lot has happened over the last 3 weeks, including choosing a supplier for the local plans alpha, emailing 499 people in local planning authorities, and having the brownfield land map announced as part of the housing Budget.
This sprint we’ve made great progress across projects, including working on IFS calculations, creating new pages for brownfield land data, and iterating the GOV.
This sprint we’ve made good progress on brownfield land, including creating a report on the data and improving the map.
This sprint we’ve made great progress with analysing developer contributions research and improving brownfield land tools and data.
We look back on what the Digital Land team worked on during the pre-election period.
We updated the guidance on GOV.UK for publishing brownfield land registers, improved the data pages on this site, and published discovery reports for the local plans, and the single register of planning projects.
Our week started well with a PropTech round table event.
Natalie and Jess have been working out plans for a PropTech event with the Minister of State for Housing, Esther McVey.
It’s been a rollercoaster of a week for the Digital Land team.
Much of this week has been focussed on planning. Lorna, Matt and Helena have been lining up local authorities for our Developer Contributions private beta, and preparing for testing Compulsory Purchase Orders in a usability lab.
With some of the team still seconded to another project, and a few of the team taking well deserved holidays we were fairly light on people in the office this week.
Monday began with a retrospective following publishing our guidance on GOV.UK.
Jess, Natalie, and Ed have been working on next week's PropTech workshop for colleagues in the Housing Delivery and Planning directorates.
We started the week on a high with the announcement on Sunday morning of new planning rules.
A short but busy week for those of us still in the office in August.
It's August, and some of the team have been seconded to lend their digital skills to another project in the department, but it's still been quite a busy week for those of us left in the office.
The week we've been working on a flow diagram that shows how data for developer contributions will be collected, stored and used to produce the dashboard and infrastructure funding statement.
A few of the digital land team were off on holiday this week, but it was still a busy week.
Paul D presented at a couple of boards and attended the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) workshop at Connected Places Catapult.
This week we held the local plans steering group to present the findings from Paul B and Helena's discovery work to our internal stakeholders.
Great news this week - EPC data is now being updated and published again on Open Data Communities, thanks to a lot of hard work over the past year from policy specialists, including Ed. Read Paul's blog post on our user research and policy work involved in resuming the publication of EPC data.
This week Paul D spoke at the PlanTech - July Breakfast Show & Tell at the ODI in Leeds, and attended the Compulsory Purchase Association conference.
This week the Digital Land team made good progress on several projects, even with most of the team at an away day on Thursday.
It’s been an exciting week! On Tuesday we found out that the Find an Energy Certificate or Assessor alpha, which Jake and Emily worked on, has passed the GDS assessment and can move onto beta.
This week in the Digital Land team, Adam, Colm and Jake have been working on the brownfield sites validator.
This week, we spent Tuesday and Wednesday together at our Team Away days. We kicked off with a team retrospective, which led to discussions around building further relationships with policy teams and how to improve the delivery of products we're working on.
The big news this week was new regulations for The Community Infrastructure Levy (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2019 have been laid before Parliament, an important step for the developer contributions policy.
This week Christine has been prototyping the registers editor and Paul D has been revisiting the python open register library.
It’s been a big week for the team as digital services and policy have merged! Ed Culliney and new recruit Natalie Record have joined the team, marking the official joining of Digital Land services with policy – the ultimate multidisciplinary team.
This week, Paul (Bermudez) and Helena have been busy working on the tail end of the Local Plans discovery.
This week Paul had his first MHCLG Digital Land birthday! It was a good moment to reflect on what we've done so far and where we're heading over the next year.
Following the three workshops we held last week for our project on developer contributions, this week the team were analysing the findings and putting together an approach to further iterate our design.
This week the Digital Land Service and the Planning Infrastructure policy team ran 3 workshops with local planning authority representatives focusing on developer contributions.
This week the team worked on preparing for the three workshops we are holding next week on developer contributions, to test the data standard with users and get feedback.
This week the team had a project kickoff with MySociety for the central register of planning applications work.
Our team is still growing! This week we welcomed our new User Research Paul Bermudez.
This week the developer contributions public consultation went live.
In advance of the public consultation for developer contributions the team have been thinking about how we’ll manage questions and feedback in an open and transparent fashion.
We presented our progress on developer contributions at a show and tell.
We are delighted to welcome Helena Trippe to our team as our new service designer!
On Tuesday Paul joined a panel at the ODI summit to talk about how local governments can take advantage of the opportunities created by data to improve public services and better serve communities.
Brownfield sites, Developer Contributions
This week we continued further work on the brownfield site validator.
A quiet team week with just two of us in the office.
The team has been working on the brownfield sites validator iterating the data model so we can understand the history of changes to registers.
The team visited the excellent Living with Buildings exhibition ahead of retrospective and roadmapping sessions in Camden.
Along with colleagues in the developer contribution policy team we met with one of the 3rd party suppliers of Section 106 management software.
We did some further work on the brownfield site validator, this was demoed by Adam in the show and tell on Thursday 4th.
Section 106 and Viability Assessments, Brownfield Site Validator and Documenting our findings
A show and tell hosted by the planning directorate. Paul Tweeted the agenda.
We showed early work on a brownfield site register validator brownfield site validation tool.
Playback of user research visits to Waltham Forest, Southwalk, Lambeth and Islington councils.
This week the team continued working on Section 106
This week the Digital Land Services team ran their first show and tell where we talked about some of our findings from discovery, and demoed an early view of the ‘brownfield sites validator’ tool.
We were joined this week by Matt Lucht, our new delivery manager, Michael Nottingham, our new part-time content editor and by Alex Blandford, a user researcher working for Rose.
Rose has been recruiting participants to give us insight into how the brownfield registers were made, and if they are working for users.
More than 40 people came to our open meeting where we gleaned many insights from users of land and housing data
Paul presented at the cross government event on API best practice