Presenting alongside MHCLG at the Digital Task Force for Planning Show and Tell

On 23 July we were invited to present at the Digital Planning Directory Show and Tell, hosted by Dr Wei Yang OBE and the Digital Task Force for Planning, the not-for-profit body working to advance digital practice across the UK planning sector.

The session opened with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government demonstrating Extract, its newly launched tool for converting historic planning documents into structured data, now available free to every local planning authority in England. Planning Appeals presented alongside, as one of four innovators showing how AI can support the sector, on the theme of learning from planning appeal decisions to improve future plan-making.

Our session was titled "The feedback loop plan-making never had".

The argument we made

Almost every industry runs on feedback loops. You see what works, you see what doesn't, and you fix it. Plan-making has never had a quick one. Yet local plans are tested at appeal week in, week out, and every decision letter is a ruling on whether a policy held up under challenge. Read together, the letters show where a plan is robust and where it isn't.

We showed how national and local policy, site designations and development metrics from the appeal record can be read as that feedback loop, using the tilted balance (NPPF paragraph 11d) as the worked example:

Use of the tilted balance has nearly doubled since the December 2024 NPPF revision, from about one in ten cases to nearly one in five, and the shift was visible in the appeal record within weeks of the policy change. Once applied, it makes almost no difference to outcomes: the allow rate sits within two points either way. And nine in ten appeal decisions cite a local policy, against just over half citing the NPPF, so the day-to-day testing of planning policy happens overwhelmingly against the local plan. That is where the feedback loop matters most.

MHCLG's Extract helps the sector get structured data from plans. Our work does the same for appeals, and we were glad to present the two side by side.

Scope and methodology

This analysis covers appeal decisions only; applications never appealed are unseen. Our methodology, including how information is drawn from decision letters and checked against the inspector's words, is published on our methodology page.

The full recording is available from the Digital Planning Directory.