Finding the most suitable locations for development in Hounslow using our SiteScore® algorithms

The London Borough of Hounslow faced the challenge of finding land for many new homes over their next plan period. The mayor’s new London Plan had set Hounslow a ten-year target for 17,820 homes, with 2,800 of these for delivery on small sites of less than 0.25 hectares.

In October 2020, the London Borough of Hounslow awarded Urban Intelligence a contract to undertake an innovative approach to the traditional local plan ‘Call for Sites’. The London Borough of Hounslow faced the challenge of finding land for many new homes over their next plan period. The mayor’s new London Plan had set Hounslow a ten-year target for 17,820 homes, with 2,800 of these for delivery on small sites of less than 0.25 hectares.

The usual process involved landowners and developers submitting and emailing PDFs of sites they were interested in for inclusion within the local plan process. Planning officers then spent months undertaking a sustainability assessment of these sites to assess their achievability, suitability, capacity, viability and availability.

The conventional approach would typically lead to around 300-600 sites submissions to a local authority. However, with our innovative approach, we instead analysed every single potential site across the borough. In Hounslow’s case, that was around 115,000 (or 191x as many plots of land).

Taking this fresh approach enabled Hounslow to consider the maximum number of development sites possible for planning purposes. It also supported the borough in meeting obligations set out by the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and London Plan policies.

UI also integrated and streamlined the ‘call for sites’ exercise itself in a module within the tool built for Hounslow. The exercise focused on the site’s availability and the likelihood of it being brought forward for development as the site’s capacity and suitability could be assessed geospatially.

Removing unnecessary questions made it less cumbersome and faster for developers to respond to the consultation, further helping to increase the number of sites submitted.

In addition, proposed sites were automatically scored and ranked using UI’s SiteScore® algorithms with rules defined and agreed upon between UI and Hounslow planners, aided by the character and context study being undertaken in parallel by leading designers Allies & Morrison.

Hounslow now has this information presented in a state of the art software system designed with officers, especially for this particular purpose.