This week at Digital Land

Team

Digital Land's PropTech round table with the housing Secretary of State for Housing

Our week started well with a PropTech round table event. The Minister of State for Housing and Planning, Esther McVey, saw demonstrations of 5 digital products and then chaired a discussion with 12 PropTech companies. The Minister, who supports our strategy, announced several Digital Land projects including:

The response from those who took part has been positive and so far the event has been reported on in 15 industry and national press articles. A huge thanks to Natalie, Jess and Alice for all their hard work arranging the event.

Placeholders with the team member's names on

Brownfield sites

Jake and Paul reviewed the specification alongside the data published by local authorities. After some discussion with policy colleagues, we decided to simplify the specification and made more fields optional. Emily and Michael updated our draft of the new guidance, following our the user tested format of the developer contributions guidance we recently published.

Developer contributions

Matt and Helena running a developer contributions workshop

Helena, Lorna and Matt held a workshop with policy colleagues to map out how the legislation for completing the infrastructure funding statement (IFS) translates as a data output in relation to our model for publishing developer contributions data. We want to test whether we can use the CSV files to populate the IFS report.

Helena completed the screening process to select local authorities to test with for our private beta. We will be meeting with 6 local authorities whilst they follow our guidance to publish their developer contributions data.

Compulsory purchase orders

Post-it notes from user research analysis

Lorna analysed the findings from the usability lab sessions where we tested our compulsory purchase orders (CPO) prototype. The response from users was very positive and we learned some interesting and useful insights, which Lorna played-back to the team. For example, we observed that users had a different understanding of when a case was “closed”. We also heard different perceptions from users around whether CPO cases should be categorised by “type”, “power” or “legislation”.