
Salford City Council: Streamlining Planning Applications with Digital AI Solutions

- Company: Agile Applications (part of the IEG Group)
- Client: Salford City Council
- Year: 2020
- Region: England
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and software solutions
- Plan-making, planning application and data management systems
Introduction
Challenges
This setup required time-intensive manual integration, with the validation and registration of a standard householder application taking around 40 minutes. Additionally, basic tasks like measuring distances on plans were cumbersome, and Planning Officers lacked tools for efficient plan analysis and comparison.
These limitations affected both the speed and quality of plan assessments, ultimately impacting the overall quality of proposals.
Solutions
The fund invited Local Planning Authorities to apply for funding via a number of projects around adoption of new services, integration, and, in Salford’s case, ‘improve existing software products and integrations to service providers’. This integration aimed to streamline and automate processes in the validation of, and registration of applications as well as the analysis of submitted plans. Following the completion of the project, Salford achieved seamless integration across the Planning Portal, and the three software solution environments, resulting in significant efficiencies.
Results
“As an authority receiving around 600 householder applications each year and almost 2,000 applications in total, this improvement has been transformative in enhancing efficiency and accuracy in application processing. Focusing on process improvements and closely integrating their tools, we have created an efficient working environment for all technical team members”.