Local Plan Evidence Reuse and Freshness Platform

- Officers repeatedly locate the latest study, confirm whether it is still current and identify which policy or site decision relies on it. - Neighbouring authorities can commission overlapping work because there is no shared view of reusable or already-commissioned evidence. - Evidence that becomes stale late in the timetable can force emergency updates, consultant extensions or changes to plan assumptions. - At examination, weak provenance makes it harder to show why a source was proportionate, current and appropriate.

The economic buyer is most likely the head of planning policy, strategic planning lead or plan programme director. Daily users include policy officers, GIS/data staff, commissioning officers and external consultants; neighbouring authorities need controlled collaboration rather than unrestricted document access.

The observed requirement is for evidence to be current, proportionate, reusable and auditable. The commercial inference is that a structured registry could save officer and consultancy time, but it should sit above government extraction/standards tooling rather than duplicate it.

Recruit two adjoining authorities entering the 2026 system. Ingest one evidence library from each, time common officer tasks before and after, identify duplicated or near-duplicated commissions and test whether the product flags evidence that needs refresh before Gateway milestones. A paid pilot should require measurable time reduction or at least one avoided/re-scoped commission.

Defensibility would come from a planning-specific evidence graph: policy question, geography, study date, methodology, commissioning body, reuse restrictions, dependent policies and refresh triggers. A growing cross-authority corpus of comparable evidence and refresh histories would be harder to reproduce than document search alone.

Reduce duplicated commissioning, shorten officer research time, surface stale evidence before it becomes critical and give inspectors and governance boards a clear evidence lineage.

Proxy based — medium confidence.

- Paid test offer: Paid authority or developer pilot: £10,000–£25,000 £12,000–£35,000 per authority/year; £40,000–£120,000 multi-authority licence; optional evidence migration/setup. A lower entry tier of roughly £8,000-£15,000 for one plan/evidence library is more credible before multi-authority value is proven; shared evidence and automated ingestion could support the existing higher range.

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 Local Plan Evidence Reuse and Freshness Platform 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 shared evidence registry that indexes studies, extracts scope/methodology/date, maps them to policy questions and geographies, flags staleness and suggests reusable neighbouring evidence. 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 90 if three authorities confirm duplicated commissioning, spreadsheet evidence registers and budget ownership for a shared solution. Reduce below 72 if Extract, existing document management and PAS templates already cover the practical workflow.