The London Borough of Hounslow and Chesterfield Borough Council have shown how digital tools can significantly improve the management of local plan consultation responses. Through a joint PropTech Innovation Fund pilot, the councils tested new consultation response management functionality within an existing digital planning platform, reducing processing time by 45 per cent and improving consistency across planning teams.
Local plan consultations typically generate large volumes of responses in varied formats, including emails, PDFs, documents and online submissions. Officers often spend weeks manually copying comments into spreadsheets, splitting lengthy representations into topics, assigning tasks and drafting responses. This manual process delays consultation outcomes and limits the time available for meaningful community engagement and plan making.
Hounslow and Chesterfield set out to reduce officer time spent processing responses, improve transparency and consistency across consultations, and create reusable digital planning tools that could integrate with existing site and evidence databases. They also wanted clearer mechanisms for tagging, assigning and analysing representations, with direct links to sites and supporting GIS planning data.
To address these challenges, planning teams from both councils worked collaboratively with Urban Intelligence to design and test new features within the PlaceMaker platform. Supported by service designers, the teams mapped the end-to-end consultation process, identifying pain points such as manual copying, topic splitting and maintaining consistent responses. Weekly design and development sessions enabled rapid iteration, while live testing took place during Hounslow’s supplementary planning document consultation, with Chesterfield conducting early testing ahead of its local plan consultation.
Consultation response management
The pilot delivered a suite of digital planning capabilities focused on consultation response management. These included processing responses in multiple formats, automatically splitting long submissions into sub-representations, tagging comments by theme, policy or site, and assigning topics to individual officers. Shared response templates improved consistency, while integrated GIS layers and site information provided clearer context. All representations were stored in a single database, enabling easier comparison across consultations.
The results demonstrated measurable efficiency gains. Hounslow reduced average processing time per comment from 55 minutes to 30 minutes, with officer time spent tagging and categorising responses cut by 45 per cent. Improved coordination, better access to contextual planning data and a reusable contact database further strengthened the councils’ digital construction and planning workflows.
The pilot also highlighted important lessons. While digital tools can significantly reduce processing time, professional judgement remains essential when summarising and tagging comments, pointing to future opportunities for AI assisted tagging and summarisation. Early scope definition, close collaboration with suppliers and strong user experience design support were all critical to delivering effective outcomes.
Both councils plan to use the system for future consultations and explore additional automation, including deeper integration with consultation modules and wider application across council services.
By proving measurable time savings, Hounslow and Chesterfield show how collaborative PropTech pilots can modernise planning consultations and create scalable foundations for future digital transformation across councils.
Read next: Digital tools piloted to improve planning transparency – Build in Digital
Read next: Are you a building professional? Sign up for a FREE MEMBERSHIP to upload news stories, post job vacancies, and connect with colleagues on our secure social feed.