Almost a year into their PlaceMaker work, we sat down with Lucinda Chapman, Principal Planner at North East Derbyshire District Council (NEDDC), to discuss how the Planning Policy team have been working to assess potential development sites, in partnership with other authorities in their Housing Market Area (HMA), to strategically support housing delivery across the region.

Working across the same HMA, NEDDC procured PlaceMaker in 2024 along with neighbouring PlaceMaker councils in Bassetlaw and Chesterfield. This collaborative approach enabled them to embark on a piece of work to align and standardise their data and methodologies for site assessment and specifically, Land Availability Assessments (LAA).

Responding to a changing planning policy landscape

The UK’s planning system is undergoing significant change with recent policy developments reflecting an ongoing effort to redefine and strengthen strategic planning across local authority boundaries. The revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) introduced mandatory housing targets, a renewed focus on sustainability, and the encouragement of local authorities to work together across functional economic and housing market areas.

With a housing target increase of 164% NEDDC have seen one of the most significant target increases under the new NPPF. The local geography consists of around 41% green belt land, adding to their need for strategic and data-driven assessment and identification of suitable sites.

Standardising data for Land Availability Assessments

Through a process of comparing and aligning existing data across the three councils, with support from the planners and data scientists at Urban Intelligence, a joint LAA methodology was developed. Using PlaceMaker, NEDDC have access to this methodology in the form of a shared residential site assessment scenario in the platform. This can be used for testing and assessing sites at scale. The scenario, which sets out how different constraints should be treated, incorporates national data and the councils' local constraints data, demonstrating how a consistent approach can be implemented not only across the local planning authority but across the HMA. Luncida shared that an additional aim of this work was that the approach could also benefit other PlaceMaker councils using the platform.

This standardised assessment enables planners across authorities to benefit from automation's significant time savings, consistently assessing sites of any size across their authority area, avoiding a manual site by site approach. This has seen a reduction in site assessment time from 3.5 hours on average to 0.5 hours per site (86% reduction), excluding site visit time, for the three HMA planning policy teams.

Following the success of their shared LAA methodology, NEDDC have also built upon PlaceMaker's accessibility scoring for sites, and have developed a dedicated tab to collate and standardise data used in sustainability appraisals (SA). They plan to use this to implement a consistent approach to SAs across the HMA.

This SA methodology includes:

• RAG ratings for key themes across the LAA methodology
• a score for site accessibility to key facilities and services

The council's first 100% digital Call for Sites exercise

With this robust and consistent automated site assessment, the council was able to run its first fully digital call for sites process —a move that reflects the broader government push towards greater digitalisation in plan-making. The hundreds of sites received were run through this automated assessment process, helping officers identify, sift and prioritise potential development sites to explore.

With PlaceMakers digital call for sites service, site promoters draw and submit their sites and relevant details into a public-facing form. This means the data is inputted directly into PlaceMaker's central database and is seamlessly integrated with the site assessment tools within the platform.

Lucinda shared how requiring users to submit through this process was a great efficiency saving for their call for sites exercise:

"Officers have not had to input or map the sites and information...We did everything online and did not allow anyone to submit sites by email or post. We offered help to anyone without digital access and only 6 people took this up, out of hundreds of sites received."

Future digital local plan developments for North East Derbyshire

Looking ahead, Lucinda and colleagues at Chesterfield and Bassetlaw are working with Urban Intelligence to develop a site selection tool to enable officers to identify sites across their area that could meet all of their criteria and understand the level of housing provision these priority sites could deliver.  This tool would enable officers to understand what remaining housing provision is unmet and begin to assess how criteria changes could support development on other sites.

By embracing digital tools and adopting a collaborative, data-driven approach, NEDDC is setting a new standard for strategic planning—one that balances local ambition with national policy direction, ensuring that the district’s future housing growth is well-planned, sustainable, and resilient.

See PlaceMaker in action

If you’d like to discover how PlaceMaker can enhance your local plan-making processes, get in touch with the Urban Intelligence team today to book a free demo and see the platform in action. Explore more case studies on our articles page to learn how councils across the UK are embracing digital local plan-making with PlaceMaker.

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