Community Infrastructure Needs and Developer Contribution Forecaster

- Education, health, open-space and transport teams can use different population or yield assumptions. - Developers may not understand likely infrastructure costs until late viability or S106 negotiation. - Councils can duplicate demographic and capacity models across Local Plan, IDP and major-site work. - If service-capacity evidence is stale, contributions can be challenged as disproportionate or fail to address the actual deficit.

Public buyers are infrastructure planning, education-place planning and planning-policy teams; private buyers are major residential developers and viability/planning consultants. Health bodies and other providers are important data stakeholders but may not be software purchasers.

The modelling need is recurring and economically important. The product should make assumptions transparent and reusable while leaving negotiation and legal tests to professional teams.

Build one module—education plus open space—for a partner authority and ten live development scenarios. Compare forecasts with existing council calculators or consultant outputs, quantify time saved and test whether developers use the figures before land or layout decisions.

A reusable local assumptions library, capacity-data connectors and a scenario audit trail could create switching costs. The most defensible asset is not the formula but a maintained dataset of service capacity, committed schemes and local standards.

Give councils and developers earlier, explainable infrastructure-cost and capacity signals so viability and phasing decisions are made with fewer surprises.

Proxy based — medium confidence.

- Paid test offer: Paid authority or developer pilot: £10,000–£25,000 £15,000–£45,000/year authority licence; £500–£2,000 per development scenario; consultancy/API tier. Authority licences of £12,000-£35,000/year plus configuration are plausible; developer scenario packs could be £500-£2,000 per scheme. Pricing should remain below repeated bespoke-study costs.

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 Community Infrastructure Needs and Developer Contribution Forecaster lasting 8–12 weeks, using an opening price of £10,000–£25,000 and covering 20 live applications, sites, conditions or evidence packs from one planning workflow. Paid scope: A scenario engine translating dwelling/employment proposals into service demand, existing capacity gaps, likely interventions and contribution ranges. 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 one authority standardises multiple service negotiations on the platform and developers accept its outputs as the starting point. Reduce below 68 if every service maintains incompatible modelling that cannot be normalised economically.