LandTech

16/10/2026

A site got ruled out early. The local plan's development management policy seemed to close the door on anything on that parcel.

Except the policies map - the bit that gets skipped in favour of jumping straight to the written policies - told a different story. And the plan itself was five years past its own review date, which matters more than most people think it does.

The local plan is the first thing a planning officer checks your site against. Knowing which order to read it in matters more than reading all of it.

We wrote up the four-stop route we'd actually take through one -

Local plans can run to hundreds of pages. Here's how to read one quickly, what to look for first, and how the 2026 planning reforms change things.

15/10/2026

A flood risk designation. A Tree Preservation Order, down to its exact reference number. How the NPPF's tilted balance test applies to a specific site.

Our AI Assistant cites all of it - not because citations are trendy, but because "trust me" isn't good enough when you're deciding whether a site's worth spending money on due diligence.

It's built for the early stages of site sourcing: qualifying opportunities faster, not signing off a multi-million-pound transaction on an AI's say-so. Anyone telling you their tool can do the latter is the one you should be double-checking.

Live now inside LandInsight for Unlimited subscribers, at no extra cost.

AI doesn't invent planning constraints, it cross-references them. Here's what's actually happening behind the scenes, and how to check it's working.

14/10/2026

We're a finalist in the Excellence in Digital Planning Practice category at the RTPI Awards for Planning Excellence 2026!

Our entry, Digital-First Engagement for Local Government Reorganisation, is a partnership between Cratus Group and Give My View. Together, we ran reorganisation consultations across Lancashire, Lincolnshire, and Staffordshire.

The judges said the standard of entries was really high this year, so we're really excited to be in the mix. Winners are announced on 3rd December in London.

Thank you to Lia Butler, Melissa Keen, and to Harriet Shone at Cratus Group, for pulling the entry together.

Full list of finalists:

The RTPI Awards for Planning Excellence 2026 showcase and celebrate the best plans, projects, homes and people - view the winners in the nations and regions.

09/10/2026

GDV tells you what a scheme is worth on completion.

Yield tells you what it's worth to hold.

We're seeing more sites get greenlit on a strong GDV number when the yield case underneath it is shaky - and that's a different kind of risk to be carrying into a slower market.

Which number carries more weight in your go/no-go call, and has that shifted for you in the last year?

06/10/2026

A site looked clean - single title, no restrictive covenants, no history of refusals. Everything a first-pass check would want to see.

Then someone actually walked the boundary and found a two-metre grass verge between the site and the adopted highway that nobody owned on paper.

A ransom strip, sitting in the one place nobody thought to check - and the whole scheme stalled for months because of it.

This is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't show up on a first-pass site check, and exactly what our Site Feasibility Checklist is built to catch before you're six weeks into due diligence.

Download yours for free here -

Stop missing hidden site risks. Use LandTech’s Site Feasibility Checklist to audit planning policy, BNG baselines, and technical constraints in seconds, not hours.

05/10/2026

Are you re-running appraisals on sites you've already dismissed?

Under the new NPPF, you might need to be.

National Decision-Making Policies now override local plan policy the moment the two conflict, with effect straight away, not once your local authority gets round to reviewing its plan. That means the gap between what your local plan says and what will actually secure consent has just widened.

The full breakdown, including a 5-step site audit checklist, is in our free NPPF Playbook -

Live masterclass on the August 2026 NPPF for land and development teams. Learn the 5 policy shifts to audit, plus a live Impact Assessment on a real site.

02/10/2026

Local Government Reorganisation isn't just a Lancashire story.; it's reshaping how planning decisions get made across large parts of England, and Lancashire is one of the first places to go through it at this scale.

It's worth understanding what happened there, because it's a fair preview of what other regions are about to go through -

How LandTech's Give My View helped Cratus Group gather 13,000+ resident voices on Lancashire's local government reorganisation, the biggest shake-up in 50 years.

30/09/2026

How many logins does it take you to properly assess a site right now?

GIS tool, a CRM, maybe a personal ChatGPT subscription you're only half-expensing because you can't fully justify it on the invoice.

Our AI Assistant doesn't add a ninth tab. It's built directly into the platform you already use, no separate subscription, no token meter to keep an eye on, no copying your work between windows. Every document it generates is saved permanently against the site it belongs to, so it's still there next week, not buried in an old chat thread you can't find.

One place to source, save, assess, and refine.

Live now for Unlimited subscribers.

29/09/2026

The planning application fee is the smallest number on the invoice, and almost nobody budgets for that properly until it's too late.

Between planning consultants, surveys, legal fees, and the appeals process if things don't go your way first time, the real cost of getting planning permission can be several times the fee itself.

We've broken down what actually goes into that total, and where the biggest surprises tend to hide -

How much does planning permission cost? A full breakdown of application fees, professional costs and the charges developers need to budget for.

28/09/2026

This is one we get asked constantly at the moment: can AI actually speed up due diligence, or is it just hype riding on the back of every other "AI-powered" product launch this year?

It’s a genuinely mixed answer! We wrote up where it helps, where it doesn't, and what to watch for either way.

Planning due diligence can eat weeks before you've even drafted an application. Here's where AI genuinely speeds it up, and where it still can't.