Bruce Buckland is an Architect, Podcaster, and Developer, as well as the CPF Association Chair in North West Hampshire.
Labour recently put out the line that communities will be able to say “how, not if” development takes place. This is all very well, but the ‘how’ needs to work better if planning is to be properly reformed.
The planning system is still wholly analogue, despite its migration online a few years ago. The problem is that it operates by applicants uploading dozens of PDF files – a mix of 2D drawings or written documents – all of which are highly costly to produce, which are then sent to the Local Authority in one big information dump.
A planning officer must then sit down and manually go through each of these documents in detail, along with dozens of public comments, and not only summarise everything for their report, but also make a judgment as to the impact of each, and how they align – or don’t align – to local policies. Despite being online it is a wholly manual system that is time-consuming, tedious, and inefficient.
There is also a second problem. People are wary of change – hence the common default of opposition to development proposals. But most people also tend to play down the effects of development once it has been completed, usually saying it’s not as bad as they’d thought, especially if it comes with infrastructural improvements.
People often complain that the final result looks nothing like the professionally produced and heavily artistically licenced renderings. So how can we aid people’s understanding from the beginning to ease fears and reduce opposition? How else could it work?
The answer is proper digitisation, delivered via data and BIM. BIM stands for Building Information Modelling, which put simply is the process of creating a digital 3D model of a building project, with all construction data embedded in the model file, and using that as the central source of information, rather than pages and pages of drawings.
There are two key benefits here: firstly the visual accuracy and ease of comprehension from a public consultation point of view, and secondly automatic compliance checks via ‘rules-as-code’.
When it comes to visual accuracy and ease of comprehension, what BIM allows is extremely easy understanding of a building project and its impact by seeing it in interactive 3D. People can open a 3D model themselves at home through a 3D browser interface on their devices, and go for a wander around it in a near-photorealistic space. There is nowhere to hide as to what the final scheme will look like.
But it is the second point where the massive potential productivity gains are to be had: automatic compliance checks via ‘rules-as-code’. What makes a BIM model so powerful is the data embedded in the 3D model. Every element contains data as to its materiality, cost, origin, lifespan, energy use, and much more. All this data can be read off the model to determine the proposal’s compliance with local planning policies, or if the necessary embedded data is not there yet, then those matters can simply be flagged as reserved for the planning officer to look at manually, as they are already.
A Local Authority can also create a ‘master model’ into which all schemes can be loaded, and the knock-on effects determined, be it on traffic flows, water supply, nutrient runoff levels, surface water runoff, environmental impacts, or whatever else you input into the model.
A Local Authority only needs to code its Local Plan and the NPPF into its master model once, then the time and cost-saving benefits accrue exponentially. Once this is done, any new planning application that uploads its own BIM model before submission will be able to use this system of ‘rules-as-code’ to automatically generate a report to determine compliance before a planning officer even goes near it. The report would inform the applicant in what areas there is non-compliance, allowing the applicant to change the proposal and submit it for a compliance check as many times as they need until the proposal complies.
Of course, there would be some areas which a human planning officer would still be needed, but by reducing their workload significantly on the bread-and-butter codable stuff, they can focus their efforts on what can’t be coded and massively reduce the time needed to process an application.
Anyone with a basic grasp of SketchUp can create a model and upload it in a format that would allow simple automatic compliance checking, such as for Householder applications or Permitted Development checks, which make up the vast majority of applications.
So what policies should we adopt that would lead us in the right direction? In a planning context, I would suggest that instead of just uploading 2D drawings, planning applications should require a 3D model as well, starting with a simple 3D model in a compatible format as the minimum for small proposals, and then increasing to a full BIM model for larger schemes.
The planners can then overlay the proposal in their own ‘master model’ of the neighbourhood and see how it fits in. Crucially, the public can do the same, viewing it in easy to comprehend format on their screens.
For the big developers and professionals such as architects who produce complex, information-rich BIM models, which tend to be on larger applications, the potential planning-process time savings are enormous, allowing proposals to go through faster, and projects to get spades in the ground sooner.
All that is needed is the upfront investment to code Neighbourhood Plans, Local Plans, and the NPPF into master models or ‘rules-as-code’ systems to allow automatic compliance checking. This, more than anything else, would speed up the planning process and get Britain building again.
For more information on how planning can be brought into the 21st century, read Alastair Parvin’s, series of articles The Future of Planning.
