Establishing foundations and scaling planning.data.gov.uk
From March 2024 to March 2026, we worked with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to scale its planning data service – restructuring the team, establishing new ways of working, and more than doubling the number of local planning authorities publishing data in the first year alone.
The problem
The planning data service (planning.data.gov.uk) collects planning and housing data from local planning authorities across England, transforming it into a consistent, open format that anyone can view, download and analyse. Better data leads to better planning decisions, faster development, and ultimately more homes built.
But the service had grown organically, and the team structure hadn’t kept pace. Two teams of 27 were responsible for a wide and expanding scope, without clear capability boundaries or shared ways of working. There was no common cadence, no OKR framework, no handbook. The platform had real potential as digital public infrastructure, but the conditions for a growing, distributed team to do its best work weren’t yet in place.
The approach
Joining as Strategic Product Lead, the primary focus was building the conditions for a growing, distributed team to do its best work and deliver on the data platform’s vision at scale.
Establishing product foundations
The first priority was establishing agile cadences from scratch: coordinated two-week sprints, quarterly planning, and fortnightly show-and-tells. An objectives and key results (OKR) framework was introduced that blended leadership and team perspectives, with bi-weekly reviews to track progress and surface blockers early. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and a North Star metric were divised to guide teams’ work and show that the platform is meeting its vision by making it easier to find, use and trust planning and housing data.
To make these ways of working durable and shareable, a team handbook was created – documenting how the service is organised, how it works, its product operating model, and the principles that underpin the work.
Accelerating data provision with a design sprint
With those foundations in place, a five-day design sprint was run with the team in London – prototyping a new end-to-end service to make it easier for LPAs to provide data. Testing with people from four LPAs surfaced actionable insights that fed directly into what the team built next.
Restructuring the team, establishing the operating model
Once the ways of working were established, the team structure was redesigned to match the service’s growing scope. Two generalist teams were reorganised into three specialised teams of around 40 people, each aligned to a distinct capability: designing data standards, collecting and managing data, and making data easy to find and use.
With the teams settled, an operating model was established to describe how they worked together end to end. Structured around the data lifecycle – from identifying a planning data need through to delivering trusted data on the platform – it gave everyone a shared model of how work flowed across teams, and ensured the platform and its data remained valuable, trustworthy, and aligned to policy and user needs over time.
Working in the open
Working in the open was central to the culture built throughout this period. Public weeknotes, regular blogging, and community drop-ins created a visible trail of evidence that proved its worth when the service came under governance scrutiny as a Government Major Project – involving ministers, senior civil servants, and cross-government partners.
Prioritising data standards for planning applications and decisions
A significant strategic call was prioritising work on data standards for the entire planning permission process – from application submission through to decision. Neither has existed as an open, official, standardised dataset before.
The applications standard treats planning applications as structured data for the first time, flowing consistently from applicants through to local authority systems. The decisions standard will create the first open, record-level national dataset of planning outcomes. Together, they lay the foundation for a more transparent planning system – and for new digital services built on top.
Modelling the economic case
To support wider investment decisions, an economic and benefits model was co-developed showing how opening up planning data generates value across the ecosystem: lowering barriers for startups, reducing duplicative data scraping costs for public and private sector organisations, and creating network effects that level the playing field. A Theory of Change projected further transformative benefits, helping to shape business cases for Spending Review. This was borne out by external research – a commissioned report by the UK PropTech Association found the sector has the potential to grow by 20% by 2032 and generate around £72 billion in revenue, with the platform’s open, standardised data as a key enabler.
The impact
The numbers tell a clear story of momentum. The number of LPAs providing at least one dataset grew from 18 to 50 in the first year – and the platform now supports 171 LPAs through the Digital Planning Improvement Fund, with 49 more joining in early 2026. The total number of datasets grew roughly sixfold, and the platform now hosts more than 400 datasets attracting 1.2 million weekly visitors and 20 million monthly hits – four times more than the year before.
The design sprint led directly to a better data provision journey, contributing to one of the most significant growth periods in the platform’s history. Local authorities are getting better at publishing higher-quality data more quickly thanks to the support from the service.
The platform’s impact has been recognised beyond government. Richard Pope, author of Platformland, highlighted it as an exemplar for UK government digital transformation – a template for creating better digital services and unlocking private sector innovation. Savills and Tract have both publicly highlighted the platform’s transformative potential for the sector.
The team handbook and working-in-the-open practices provided the governance evidence needed to navigate Major Project scrutiny. And the prioritisation of the planning applications and decisions data standards represents a landmark moment: for the first time, England will have an open, consistent, record-level dataset covering the entire planning permission process – a foundation for a more transparent, evidence-driven planning system.
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