Evidence from UK Digital Planning & PropTech Pilots

And the case for an Irish pilot focused on housing delivery

The UK’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) / DLUHC has a dedicated Digital Planning Programme to modernise England’s planning system – explicitly evolving from a documents-based system to one that is data-driven, standards-based and user-centred (next step is towards a more 3D/visual-based system).

Within this sits the PropTech Innovation Fund, introduced in 2021, now described as the largest UK Government PropTech programme supporting Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) to work with industry at pace and scale. 

After four funding rounds, the Fund has:

• Supported 77 Local Planning Authorities
• Delivered 114 pilot projects
• In partnership with more than 50 PropTech companies, many directly relevant to pre-planning and digital planning

Across these pilots, the core themes include:

• Digital citizen engagement in planning [my own particular area of focus]: tools to improve public participation, visualise proposals and collect structured feedback, including dedicated ‘digital citizen engagement’ rounds and scaling projects. 
• Land data and pre-planning site assessment: products to improve access to land data, automate site identification and assessment, and support strategic plan-making.
• Unlocking small / complex sites: several initiatives focus specifically on small-site deliverability and viability – areas where manual assessment currently consumes significant planner and developer time.
• Infrastructure capacity and certainty: pilots are exploring how to expose infrastructure constraints earlier in the pipeline to de-risk applications.

Taken together, these are targeted at the pre-planning bottlenecks: site identification, early feasibility, data-sharing and meaningful public engagement before formal application.

New UK initiative focused explicitly on housing delivery

In 2025 the UK extended this work with a dedicated PropTech Innovation Challenge, run with Geovation (Ordnance Survey) as a strategic partner:

• Funding envelope: £1.2 million
• Objective: to directly support the Government’s commitment to deliver 1.5 million homes in England during the current Parliament by tackling systemic barriers in planning and housing delivery 
• Selection: 12 winning project teams chosen from 84 applications (competition oversubscribed 7:1)
• Grant scale: each team receives up to £100,000 to develop and test solutions in live environments with local authority and developer partners through to March 2026 
• Problem focus (all pre-planning / early-stage): 
  • Access to land and planning data (AI-driven land platforms, constraint mapping)
  • Small-site viability engines and tools to support SME housebuilders
  • Infrastructure mapping and certainty tools
  • Digital planning assistants and workflow tools to streamline the front end of the process

This challenge is framed explicitly as a strategic investment in digital tools to unlock housing delivery, not simply as a generic innovation exercise.

*The introduction of UDZs in the new Planning & Development Act 2024 presents a strong new opportunity to deploy AI on the basis of a plan-led subject area in Ireland.

System-level scaling – not just isolated pilots

Alongside the PropTech pilots, the UK has created a parallel funding and implementation route designed to embed successful approaches across multiple councils:

• The Digital Planning Improvement Fund provides LPAs with £50,000 grants and support to adopt modern planning practices, enhance digital capabilities and publish planning data. A recent round supported 46 LPAs to join the Open Digital Planning (ODP) initiative. 
• Open Digital Planning is a cross-sector partnership where LPAs co-develop and implement shared, open-standards planning software and data models, with UK Government funding specifically to accelerate uptake. 
• As of 2025, public reporting indicates that roughly 100 additional councils have joined digital planning initiatives in the previous year alone, each receiving £50,000 to support digital transformation of planning services.

*These numbers demonstrate three important points of learning for Ireland:

1. Sustained central funding for digital planning is now the norm in England, not a one-off pilot.
2. Pilots are explicitly tied to scale-up pathways (e.g. from PropTech Innovation Fund to Open Digital Planning adoption).
3. The policy narrative links digital planning to housing and infrastructure delivery, not just administrative efficiency.

Why does this matter for Ireland – and why now?

Ireland faces many of the same structural challenges identified by the UK:

• fragmented and inaccessible planning and land data
• limited capacity in planning authorities to handle complex cases and public engagement
• a need to de-risk and accelerate housing delivery, particularly medium-density and small-site schemes
• rising expectations from communities for transparent, accessible, digital-first engagement

The UK evidence shows that relatively modest, targeted investment (e.g. £50,000 per authority; £50,000–£100,000 per pilot) can: 

• bring multiple planning authorities and technology firms into structured partnerships
• standardise and open up planning data
• test digital tools that directly support plan-making, pre-planning and early-stage feasibility
• generate reusable digital products and patterns which can be rolled out nationally

In terms of re-risking innovation, Ireland does not need to start from scratch. There is now a significant body of live, government-led experimentation in a neighbouring jurisdiction, specifically targeted at the same outcomes Ireland is seeking: more homes, delivered faster, with better public participation and clearer data.

‘Ask’ of Irish State agencies

On the basis of the UK experience and existing Irish capacity, I would ask:

1. Will Irish Government consider a dedicated Digital Planning & PropTech Pilot Fund (analogous to the UK PropTech Innovation Fund) to support local authorities and Irish/EU PropTech firms to co-develop tools for:
   • land and planning data accessibility
   • small-site identification and viability
   • earlier infrastructure constraint mapping
   • digital citizen engagement in plan-making and pre-planning?
2. Could an Irish pilot be explicitly linked to housing delivery targets, as the UK has done with its commitment to 1.5 million homes, so that digital planning is framed as core enabling infrastructure for housing rather than a box-ticking IT project? 
3. What mechanism would be most appropriate in the Irish context to:
   • provide small, rapid grants to local authorities (on the order of €50k–€100k) to participate in pilots
   • create an ‘Open Digital Planning for Ireland’ collaboration space to share code, data standards and user research
   • ensure pilots are evaluated and, where effective, funded to scale?
4. How can existing Irish expertise and international networks be used, so that Ireland can plug into, and contribute to, the wider ecosystem of digital planning best practice developing in the UK and across Europe?

There is existing capacity in Ireland that can:

• translate lessons from UK pilots into the Irish legal and policy context
• support co-design between State agencies, local authorities and industry innovators
• ensure public engagement and social value are embedded in any digital planning pilots, not treated as afterthoughts.

As someone who has mentored PropTech startups and engaged in ongoing knowledge exchange with PropTech and digital-planning communities across the EU and globally sinceI 2016,  would welcome the opportunity to work with relevant Departments, State agencies and local authorities to:

• map UK pilot themes and outcomes against Irish planning and housing policy priorities, and
• co-design a targeted Irish Digital Planning & PropTech Pilot that could be launched on a time-bound basis to support housing delivery, with clear metrics and evaluation from the outset.

This would allow Ireland to leverage proven international approaches, while tailoring them to our planning system, housing needs and community expectations.

*Industry and academic context: https://caroltallon.com/reimagining-citizen-participation-what-irish-planners-need-to-know-about-digital-engagement-in-2025/