30-Month Local Plan Delivery Operating System

- A missed evidence, consultation or committee dependency can push multiple downstream milestones. - Teams often maintain separate trackers for evidence, consultation, risks and governance, obscuring the real critical path. - Gateway readiness can be judged too late if evidence quality, resourcing and sign-off are not tracked against explicit criteria. - Programme knowledge can become concentrated in one experienced policy manager, creating continuity risk when vacancies or turnover occur.

The buyer is likely the head of planning policy, local-plan programme manager or director accountable for timetable compliance. Daily users include workstream leads, evidence commissioners, legal/SEA colleagues and external consultants; senior members need concise readiness and exception reporting rather than task-level detail.

The need is validated, but PAS is also supplying much of the methodology for free. The software opportunity is converting the published route, PID and gateway expectations into a live dependency/readiness system, not inventing a new methodology.

Configure one authority's actual timetable and PID into a prototype. Track 8-12 weeks of work and test whether it exposes critical dependencies earlier than the council's current PMO tools. A paid pilot should replace at least two shadow trackers or materially simplify a Gateway-readiness pack.

Defensibility requires encoded planning-stage logic: gateway evidence, consultation windows, SEA/HRA dependencies, committee calendars, examination documents and automatically calculated readiness. Benchmark data on slippage causes across multiple plans would add more value than another Gantt chart.

Give the programme lead one defensible view of timetable, readiness, resourcing and governance so slippage is identified while corrective action is still possible.

Proxy based — medium confidence.

£10,000–£30,000 per plan/year; implementation £5,000–£20,000; consortium licences for joint plans. A £10,000-£25,000 annual plan licence is more defensible than per-seat pricing because value is tied to one statutory programme. Complex committee/evidence configuration can be charged separately.

Evidence basis: Agile AI Planning Validator (£15,000–£60,000 per licence) is the closest verified adjacent anchor used here. Its buyer, duration and scope are not assumed to be identical; implementation is separated where the opportunity requires integration, assurance or managed delivery.

Ask one planning authority, developer or planning consultancy with a live case pipeline to fund a paid test of 30-Month Local Plan Delivery Operating System lasting 8–12 weeks, using an opening price of £5,000–£20,000 and covering 20 live applications, sites, conditions or evidence packs from one planning workflow. Paid scope: A planning-specific programme workspace that turns the statutory route into a live critical path with gateway evidence, governance, consultation and examination-readiness controls. Charge by authority, professional team, development site or assessed case and compare the fee with planning-officer and consultant time, avoidable invalid submissions and repeated evidence assembly. Measure validation time, missing-document rate, rework, officer overrides, applicant resubmissions and decision lead time. Continue only if handling or rework falls by at least 25%, at least 90% of required evidence is correctly identified and no material planning issue is suppressed. Stop or reprice if experienced officers find material false assurance, the workflow does not beat current practice or the buyer will not renew.

Raise above 88 if first-wave authorities report parallel spreadsheets and difficulty proving Gateway readiness. Reduce below 70 if most councils simply embed the PAS route into existing corporate PMO software with little friction.