Open Digital Planning: Month 9

Digging into Data, Embracing AI, and a Touch of Local History

It’s been a busy and productive period for our multi-disciplinary team. As usual we’re balancing the Open Digital Planning project alongside day-to-day business as usual work, and the team has done a commendable job attempting to find time to ensure they remain on top of our work objectives.

Here’s a comprehensive look at our recent progress, the hurdles we’re navigating, and what’s coming next.

Tackling the TPO Dataset

Continuing on from previous months, our biggest dataset — Tree Preservation Orders (TPOs) — has been full of hurdles all the way. From identifying missing TPOs to the immense manual effort required to scan and upload documents so they are ready to plot, the team has worked hard to ensure the dataset we provide meets ODP requirements.

This effort has yielded major successes:

• Massive Cleansing Progress: We have continued cleansing our biggest dataset. As a result of a huge team effort, we now have all Adur documents scanned and a significant majority of Worthing’s documentation digitised.
• Collaborative Process: The team has been using a highly effective scanning process devised and tested through their own collaborative working.
• Improved Quality Checks: The team also sat down with our Tree Officer to understand and find potential solutions to TPO problems, which has actively helped improve our data quality checks.

A Fun Finding from the Archives

It has been a fascinating journey scanning and reading the paperwork for the historic TPOs, seeing how our governance has changed over the decades. We’ve come across handwritten memos, old fax notes, and letters from customers — including a letter from a 9-year-old girl asking us to save her favourite tree!

These personal touches are a wonderful reminder of the community we serve and the human factor that connects generations of staff and residents to Adur and Worthing.

Exploring Innovation: Extract AI & The Local Plan

We are actively exploring transformation opportunities and doing the research work needed to modernise our planning services:

• Extract AI Testing: We explored using the Extract AI tool to support our TPO plotting. We met with the developers who kindly made the visit down to Adur and Worthing’s Town Hall to test their tool with our own data, and we provided feedback directly to their staff. This shows real promise for innovation and time-saving.

• Digitising the Local Plan: Our Service Designer (SD) and Business Analyst (BA) came together with our Planning Policy Lead to explore transformation opportunities. They are working to understand what could be needed to better our Local Plan and are exploring the potential to digitise this, as other councils have successfully shown.
• Grant Funding: We applied for MHCLG grant funding opportunities to further support our local planning needs, specifically focusing on potential PlanX adoption and backend development improvements. This shows our serious consideration in attempting to improve our planning services as a whole.
• Listed Buildings Resolved: On a positive note, the three remaining Listed Buildings issues from before have now been fully resolved.

Navigating the Challenges

Of course, transformation comes with its roadblocks:

• System Integration Limits: While Extract AI is impressive, it currently cannot interface directly with Uniform, which limits our ability to fully capitalise on its benefits right now.
• Lost History vs. Unprecedented Cleansing: Some historic documentation has not been located, and we may have to accept that these have simply been lost to time. That said, this data cleansing exercise has been unprecedented in its scale and has significantly raised the standards of our digital historical records.
• Complex Mapping: Listed Building Curtilages remain a complex issue, one in which it seems the wider community as a whole finds tricky to understand how to tackle.

What’s Next?

As we reach the end of the financial year, many staff will be using up their annual leave and getting some spring breaks in. This, combined with BAU impacting staff involved in any end-of-year reporting (heading into April), means our capacity will be impacted this month.

Despite this, our focus for the immediate future includes:

• Uploading TPO Datasets: We aim to get these uploaded hopefully within our planned schedule.
• PlanX Opportunities: Continuing to explore potential PlanX adoption.
• Transformation Re-planning: Replanning our time for further transformation work.
• Self-Build Register: Continuing work on the self-build register as a deeper development.
• Local Plan Research: Gaining further understanding within the project team regarding the Local Plan and exactly what is needed.