In the fourth of BEFS ‘Joining the Dots’ series exploring interconnected policy agendas for Scotland’s built environment, Dr Caroline Brown, Director for Scotland, Ireland and English Regions at the RTPI, explores how data integration could transform policy implementation and decision-making.
Dr Caroline Brown, Royal Town Planning Institute, writes for Built Environment Forum Scotland:
In her first Joining the Dots piece, Hazel Johnson said that the policy landscape is complex. I’d like to add to that assessment and suggest that policy complexity is not a static feature – but it’s something that changes over time, as policy develops. Looking at things from planning perspective, the last few years have added new topics, new technologies and new duties to the remit of planners – whether that’s play sufficiency assessments, nature networks, battery storage and hydrogen to name a few. The result is a policy landscape that is complex and dynamic, and trends towards both deepening and broadening.
As well as increasing numbers of topics, planning now involves many more technical assessments and tools. As a case in point the guidance on NPF4 Policy 2 climate mitigation and adaptation was published very recently, explaining how lifecycle carbon assessments are to be used in the decision-making process. It’s not enough to support renewables and energy efficiency, planners are being asked to consider a technical assessment of lifecycle carbon as part of the planning process.
These examples are in themselves a form of Joining the Dots – linking national policy goals through to decisions and developments on the ground. And technical assessment is a necessary step in realising those national ambitions. But just adding more work to the system isn’t yet delivering the step change needed. So, what else could be done?
I want to make the case here for data – and the potential of data integration as a way of joining the dots. As a former (recovering) academic, you might not be surprised that I’m keen on building an evidence base to support all forms of policy development and implementation. There is lots of data out there, but it’s not necessarily in the right places or available in the right formats to make it usable.
All of us will be aware of reports commissioned at various times and places about biodiversity, ground conditions, archaeology, or something else – but which exist solely in a stand-alone document, possibly in PDF. Local authority planning portals must collectively have thousands of examples of these sitting on the cyber shelves. Many of these provide useful data about individual plots of land and the surrounding neighbourhood – but it’s both inaccessible and invisible in its current format. What if we could make it available and usable?
Let’s just imagine that scenario and what it might mean. For local authorities, it would allow data submitted to support planning applications – transport models, ground conditions, contaminated land assessments, site investigations and ecological surveys to be presented in a map layer – making it accessible to decision makers. This could be embedded into a digital twin or a digital gazetteer and allow local authority officers and members to interrogate that the data layer to help inform decision making. I think we could all imagine how that might be useful. There is also something else here about the accumulation and collation of spatial data. We all understand the idea of crowd-sourcing information and the power of citizen science using mass observation to build robust data sets. But where data is stored in a PDF, there’s no opportunity to harness that robustness.
If you have never come across it before then please let me introduce you to GiGL. One of my favourite acronyms in the built environment sector – Greenspace information for Greater London – is a records centre that manages, collates and does useful things with environmental data. GiGL offers an array of tools, including data visualisations such as maps, tables and infographics. These tools can help professionals assess a specific site as well as consider wider issues across a neighbourhood or a whole London borough. For example, GiGL has developed a nature deficiency measure – mapping areas in London which have the least greenspace. This tool joins the dots between environmental data and policy goals on accessible natural greenspace and maps them in a way that makes it usable to practitioners. That can of course include decisions on planning applications, or the preparation of a new development plan – but it can also influence other public sector strategies on parks, active travel, school grounds, street trees and budgets for local nature projects.
In Scotland we are blessed with Canmore which has been refreshed as Trove (an excellent name for all that treasured data). Trove also demonstrates the power of collating information, digitising records and making things accessible and searchable through a web interface. But, imagine going further than GiGL and Canmore and combining heritage data, transport information and all the other things you can think of into the same digital platform. Imagine being able to draw on the information collected through the planning process. What else could you do? What other links could be made? What other synergies could be discovered?
Glasgow City Council has been doing its own digital data integration work, creating a digital twin which has just been made public (June 2025). It’s a work in progress, but good to see the variety of data layers which have been included in the model – including data about trees and forest cover. In the era of big data, AI tools and the commercialisation of data, joining up data to inform decision makers seems an obvious step. We shouldn’t get hung up on the technicalities of the best way to do this – but rather press ahead with trying it out. And, since architecture and building design is already happening in digital form, digital twins can also support the integration of CAD models of new buildings into the city’s datascape.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently announced a new AI tool called ‘Extract’ being rolled out to planners in England. The tool will enable data to be extracted from planning documents and turn it into data ‘in minutes’. Whilst the emphasis of the Labour Government is on speeding up planning, I think AI tools like this one just might do something much more profound. They could bring data and evidence into decision-making in a way that is simply not possible at the moment. What a breakthrough that would be.
