This week at Digital Land
A few of the digital land team were off on holiday this week, but it was still a busy week.
Local plans
Helena and Paul B presented the insights and outcomes from the Local Plans discovery to planning and housing colleagues across MHCLG. The discovery findings focused on the needs of users working in our department, the Planning Inspectorate Service (PINS) and local planning authorities.
We're now in the process of shaping an alpha to define the data needed to increase the visibility of where Local authorities are in their local plan making, and the types of policy areas covered in a local plan.
Visting Croydon Council
Paul (Downey) visited Croydon Council and presented the digital land work at their show and tell. The eggs and cake metaphor went down well with team!
Love the "you can't extract eggs from a cake" metaphor @psd is using to explain why we need better raw data across the system, and to not have to retrospectively decipher it from written strategy documents and reports pic.twitter.com/QH0VJ50b21
— Neil Williams (@neillyneil) August 6, 2019
Digital Land architecture
Either side of the visit to Croydon, Paul D and Jake spent some time discussing the digital land architecture. Learning from the projects over the past few months we're now getting a clearer picture of the tools and services that can help people who are creating and publishing data.
Visting Southwark
Lorna and Matt went along to Southwark Council to hear about the work that they're doing in the PlanTech space. There was a presentation from PlanX who are about to go into beta with Southwark. Plan X helps people understand whether they need to apply for planning permission based on the site location, and the type of build or modification they wish to make.
This presentation was followed by a joint demo between Plan X, the LDCU funded back office planning system, and Vu.City who gave a glimpse at what a future digital planning system may look like.
Digital Land Policy
Ed attended a spending review challenge session that helped us to align our work with the rest of the department.