Almost every planning department in England is short of the skills it needs. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government's own 2023 survey of local planning authorities found that 97% report a skills gap somewhere in their team, and the Royal Town Planning Institute estimates the sector is short by well over two thousand planners nationally. Whatever policy asks of planning next (with whole life carbon, circular economy, biodiversity net gain, and energy performance already asking a great deal), most authorities will be asking just as much from teams that are already stretched.
The instinctive response is to call for more recruitment, or to bring in costly external consultants to fill the gap while that search continues. Both help, up to a point. The deeper issue is often not the number of people in a team; it is what they are equipped to do: many planning teams have committed staff who still either the lack the specialist expertise, training or appropriate tools to review highly technical applications with certainty. Recruitment and consultancy fees alone do not resolve that. Working alongside local authorities on exactly this problem has convinced me there is a second lever worth taking seriously: partnership between councils, industry and technology providers to build digital solutions that extend the capacity a team already has.
Westminster City Council's experience with whole life carbon review is a useful example. Westminster City Council is, by local authority standards, well resourced, with dedicated sustainability officers already in post. But its own ambitions, most notably its Retrofit First policy (Policy 43), formally adopted in January 2026, ask more of both applicants and case officers than a largely manual, fragmented review process could keep pace with. Westminster's response was to digitalise that process. Developed by Preoptima, in collaboration with Westminster City Council the Planning Application Compliance Evaluation and Readiness (PACER) tool gives officers a structured, consistent and auditable way to review Whole Life Carbon Assessments submitted with planning applications, increasing internal capacity, turnover, data collection and efficiency within across the workflow.
PACER was not built in isolation. Its development was supported by two Innovate UK grants, with its impact independently evaluated through a study funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and facilitated by Innovate UK. More unusually, its development involved close collaboration with more than 36 other local planning authorities and public sector organisations, alongside a similar number of applicant organisations who tested the platform and fed back on its design directly. That scale of user testing is unusual for public sector software, and it shows. Letting the people who will actually use a tool govern its design, rather than treating them as an audience for a finished product, is something the wider software industry, inside and outside government, would do well to learn from.
"Collaborating with Preoptima on PACER has been an exciting opportunity," said Hrabrina Nikolova-Laxness, Principal Sustainability Officer at Westminster City Council. "By streamlining data and compliance checks, PACER helps bridge the gap between policy and implementation."
PACER officially launched on 8 July, at an event hosted at Westminster City Hall that brought together council officers, applicant organisations and the wider planning and built environment sector to mark its move from pilot into live use.
Pictured Speakers: Tracy Darke, Director of Town Planning and Building Control, Westminster City Council (Left); Debbie Jackson, Executive Director - Regeneration, Economy and Planning, Westminster City Council (Right)
Pictured: Event attendees
Some event Speakers (Left to Right): Tracy Darke, Director of Town Planning and Building Control, Westminster City Council; Hrabrina Nikolova-Laxness, Principal Sustainability Officer, Westminster City Council; Annette Davis, Principal Whole Life Carbon Officer, Westminster City Council; Michela Ravaglia, Head of Partnerships and Sustainability, Preoptima; Duncan Cox, Sustainability Director, Thornton Tomasetti; Alfred Millan, Senior Embodied Carbon Lead, AtkinsRéalis; Alejandro Mar Morales, Senior Whole Life Carbon and Sustainability Engineer, Cundall.
Dr Wei Yang, Chief Executive Officer of the Digital Task Force for Planning, put the wider point well: "It is a very good way to show how the public sector and the private sector should work together to create innovation for the public good."
PACER is modular by design, and Westminster's use of it today is a starting point rather than a ceiling. The same platform already extends into energy compliance, with circular economy capability also part of the wider roadmap, reflecting how quickly technical requirements in planning are likely to keep expanding.
Westminster City Council deserves real credit here, for recognising early that ambitious policy needs matching investment in the infrastructure to deliver it, and for being willing to build that infrastructure in partnership rather than looking to simply outsource it. If the planning system is going to meet the scale of what is being asked of it, on carbon, energy effciency, nature, housing, and a mix of everything else - we will need genuine public sector leadership, technology built with users rather than for them, and a willingness to be evaluated honestly, to foster a more sustainable, resilient, and impactful planning system.