Sharing planning data across council boundaries for strategic, sustainable site planning 

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Challenge  

Harlow and Gilston Garden Town (HGGT) is a cross-boundary initiative involving five councils aiming to deliver healthy Garden Town led growth and regeneration for new and existing communities in and around Harlow. The programme involves managing the delivery of 23,000 new homes, four new Garden Town neighbourhoods, the regeneration of Harlow town centre, and it will create 20,000 jobs.   

This healthy town approach requires multiple citizen consultations around sustainable plans. Several challenges in managing and using consultation data within the HGGT partnership arose as the volume of data from different feedback initiatives grew; consultation data was in different formats and managed using various tools and systems. This led to inefficiencies and difficulty sharing important information across the partnership. A system was needed that consolidated data gathered from various engagements and streamlined the planning process, and allowed for different formats, tools and systems to be involved across the council boundaries.  

Approach  

HGGT secured £295k PropTech Innovation funding towards creating a shared, accessible, and interactive consultation dashboard. The aim was to find a way to standardise a chosen set of four digital tools and enable HGGT to store, visualise, and share consultation data with partners and the public in order to enhance data accessibility, streamline feedback processes, and improve community engagement. The idea was to move away from static reports, overcome interoperability challenges between different digital systems, and increase transparency, as well as foster trust with the community by showing how feedback shapes plans. The project also aimed to enhance collaboration and digital capacity within the HGGT partnership through external expertise and training.   

By layering consultation data from different sources, HGGT aimed to gain holistic, data-driven insights into consultation responses. The goal was for the tools to help monitor and visualise the data in different formats, make it easy to share the findings with the community, and encourage community involvement in consultations so it can help shape plans.  

Results  

The funded project has completed its discovery phase, which focused on developing, testing and obtaining feedback on four solutions. As the tools tested have not been fully implemented during this phase, the savings are anticipated rather than proven. Baseline data was collected at East Herts, Epping Forest and Harlow District Councils. This data was then compared with anticipated data from the same three councils following testing of the four solutions.   

Anticipated results for these three councils:   

• In officer time, savings are 50% on average  

• In cost savings across officer time and consultant fees, savings are 50% (equating to around £27,000).  

The four solutions that underwent rigorous testing, validation and refinement delivered impressive and encouraging findings:  

Collaboration Portal – Microsoft Teams/SharePoint: This solution to support the partnership is working well, facilitating collaboration among users. A dedicated Teams Channel has been established which is accessible to all officers with an involvement with the HGGT project and has been deemed largely successful in how officers share, collaborate and store documents and files, as well as enhancing real-time communication. 

Data Dashboard – Microsoft PowerBI: This tool is focused on supporting the partnership, designed to provide comprehensive data visualisation and business intelligence capabilities, enabling users to make data-driven decisions by presenting data in an accessible and actionable format. The data dashboard developed means HGGT and partners can take a holistic look at several datasets, layering data which provides comprehensive insights. The dashboard is working well and absorbing new datasets regularly.  

Data Hub & Survey Platform – Go Vocal (formerly CitizenLab): This platform for engaging residents in consultations is significantly reducing officer time in comparison to traditional consultation methods. It focuses on engaging residents in data collection and participation through surveys and feedback mechanisms, creating a centralised hub for gathering and analysing user inputs. 

Upgraded HGGT website & ‘Ask Arlo’ chatbot: The new HGGT website is now live and supports the community, providing users with an enhanced online experience. An AI chat function called ‘Ask Arlo’ is now available through ‘Hello Lamppost’, and data from this feature will be integrated into the dashboard. Efforts to shorten the ‘you said, we did’ feedback loop are underway.  

Following the successful completion of the discovery phase, the plan is to move onto the project’s next phase which involves making informed decisions around implementation of the proposed solutions.  

Next steps   

The solutions continue to be evaluated, ensuring they’re fit for various user groups and that they deliver the anticipated benefits outlined in the discovery phase such as improved efficiency, collaboration and data insights. It’s an encouraging picture as HGGT progresses towards preparing to implement the tools and technologies that prove the most successful.