Coronavirus and the digitalisation of planning: perspectives from practice and academia

Although the Government’s public sector reform agenda has included the long-term aim of digitalising the planning system, this chapter sketches how the lockdown has accelerated/is accelerating these existing processes very quickly and highlights how some aspects of the transition were problematic with spatial variability in the readiness and the degree to which LPAs were already digitalised based on differences in procurement, IT systems and resources. Whilst there are ways in which the system could and should be modernised, the complicated and multi-faceted nature of planning alongside the experience of digitalisation during lockdown pose significant challenges for the Government’s subsequent (proposed) comprehensive digitalisation of the system in the Planning White Paper, Planning for the Future.