We are delighted to announce that City Science has won funding to lead a consortium for Round 6 of the PropTech Innovation Fund.
City Science has won funding to lead a consortium for Round 6 of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s (MHCLG) PropTech Innovation Fund, and has started an 8-month pilot to explore how digital tools can help Local Authorities build a more proportionate, reusable evidence base for Local Plans and Spatial Development Strategies.
The consortium includes members from Plymouth City Council, Cheshire and Warrington Combined Authority, Tewkesbury Borough Council, and Cheltenham Borough Council. Working closely with these stakeholders will ensure that our project is designed, tested, and tailored to meet the needs of planning officers across the country.
The Fund is a flagship part of MHCLG’s Digital Planning programme, supporting local and combined authorities and industry to test and adopt digital tools that modernise planning and accelerate housing delivery.
Consolidating a robust evidence base for a Local Plan is often slow and costly, and typically relies on external consultants. So as part of the pilot, we’re performing systematic reviews of local plans and other documents, putting together an evidence baseline, and automating the analyses and derived evidence, so Local Authorities can self-serve their evidence database and reproduce their own analyses, all in one platform.
The project will grow the in-built data catalogue in Cadence, our flagship web-mapping platform, and further develop Cadence Workflows to produce new ways for Local Authorities to automate, calculate, and tailor their derived evidence to their local area. Geospatial templates populated with evidence baselines will also be created in consultation with our stakeholders. Planning officers will ultimately benefit from getting a head start in consolidating their evidence while reducing the need for costly external support.
We are delighted to be a part of this programme that aims to help Local Authorities deliver new plans in much faster timeframes. One of the biggest challenges local authorities face is consolidating evidence. The current alternatives are often both time-consuming and high-cost. As part of this programme, we will enhance Cadence and Cadence Workflows to cost-effectively deliver high-quality evidence in a much more streamlined way.
Laurence Oakes-Ash, CEO of City Science
A showcase of the project is planned for early 2027. In the meantime, we’ve published the first in a series of blogs on the project: Enhancing SDS Definitions for Efficient Local Plan Evidence, looking at what a proportionate evidence base should actually look like.