Heritage Impact Evidence and Cumulative-Effects Workspace

- Consultants spend significant desk time assembling designated assets, HER records, historic mapping and previous assessments before interpretation begins. - Cumulative schemes can be missed if nearby committed or proposed development is tracked separately. - Different report authors can describe the same asset and significance inconsistently across project phases. - If source and professional judgement are not separated, later reviewers cannot easily see what was observed versus inferred.

Primary users are heritage and archaeology consultancies and multidisciplinary planning practices; renewable and infrastructure developers are attractive enterprise buyers because they commission repeated assessments. LPAs and heritage bodies are more likely reviewers or data partners.

Open data makes asset discovery easier, but professional interpretation of significance and setting remains the valuable human work. A tool should compress data assembly and preserve the reasoning and audit trail, not generate the heritage conclusion.

Give two heritage consultancies 20 past sites and measure time from instruction to a complete desk-based evidence pack. Then use the workspace on five live jobs and track how much authored reasoning is reused safely across revisions without loss of provenance.

A structured asset-significance-setting-effect graph with citations, site photos or views and cumulative-project history could be reusable across project stages. Consultant-owned precedent libraries and templates can create practice-level switching costs.

Reduce repetitive heritage desk research while increasing consistency, provenance and cumulative-effects control across assessments.

Proxy based — medium confidence.

£100–£500/site screening; £3,000–£12,000/year consultant licence; larger enterprise/API plans. £2,000-£10,000/year per consultant team plus per-project HER or data costs is plausible; enterprise infrastructure portfolios could support higher pricing if multiple specialists share the same evidence base.

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 Heritage Impact Evidence and Cumulative-Effects Workspace lasting 8–12 weeks, using an opening price of £2,000-£10,000/year and covering 20 live applications, sites, conditions or evidence packs from one planning workflow. Paid scope: A heritage assessment workspace that builds the asset list, captures significance/setting reasoning, links sources and manages cumulative effects across nearby proposals. 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 82 if heritage firms adopt the evidence graph as their standard project record. Reduce below 60 if benefits are limited to asset-list generation that existing GIS and HER tools already provide.