News | 18 March 2026

Yesterday we hosted our first webinar, and honestly, it felt like a milestone worth marking properly. Four weeks ago, we launched Planda Portal into a market that has not seen meaningful change in two decades. Since then, we have had thousands of conversations with agents, planning consultants and council officers, shipped features faster than we expected, and learned more than we anticipated. Yesterday we brought 150 people together to show what we have built and what is coming over the next three months - including a significant new announcement for councils.

Here is everything we covered.

The problem we are solving

It is worth starting here, because the scale of it still surprises people when they hear it. Around 50% of planning applications arriving at local authorities are currently invalid. Not because agents are not doing their jobs, but because the submission process offers almost no safety net. A missing north arrow, a mislabeled document, an incorrect scale, any one of these can invalidate an application and trigger weeks of back and forth between councils and applicants that neither side has time for.

Planda Portal sits in that gap. Before an application reaches a council, our AI validator checks it against a set of national and local requirements, flags issues and gives the applicant the chance to fix them. In our first four weeks, the platform spotted 2,453 issues ahead of submission. Fewer than 15% of applications submitted through us were flagged as invalid at the council. We are four weeks in and we are already seeing the difference.

We have been listening!

Something we are genuinely proud of is how quickly feedback has moved into the product. In the first four weeks, we delivered 160-plus improvements and launched six new features, all driven by what agents and applicants told us was missing or frustrating from the current option in the market. We had 1,250-plus user conversations in four weeks, and if you were one of them, there is a good chance something you said is already in the product! 

A few specific examples we shared: users wanted to edit and remove documents at any point in the submission process, not just when something had been flagged, so we made that possible. Many wanted to upload their own site and location plans rather than generating them in the portal, so we added that. We adjusted file upload limits to work for both architects handling large drawing sets and councils whose case management systems have size constraints. We moved archiving up the roadmap because users wanted to keep their dashboards tidy. And as of today, users can download a draft application form directly to share with clients before submission.

New council dashboard

This is the big one, and the announcement we were most excited to share.

From very early on, councils told us they wanted more than a submission channel. They wanted visibility, control and a way to configure Planda Portal around their specific workflows. We heard that clearly, and today we announced that we are building a dedicated Council Dashboard - free for all local authorities.

The initial dashboard will give councils the ability to configure payment preferences and reconcile payments sent to them, view and track all applications submitted via Planda Portal, set their communication and transmission preferences, and most significantly, manage and configure the local validation checks our AI performs before submission. That last capability matters because validation requirements are not uniform. What one authority needs to see on a drawing is not always what another requires, and the dashboard gives councils the tools to set those parameters themselves rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all national checklist.

What we are building next

Beyond the council dashboard, we shared a detailed look at what is coming for agents and applicants. Users will be able to return applications to draft or archived states, make minor corrections after submission without starting again, and duplicate existing applications to reuse information from previous submissions. Clearer post-submission status updates are coming too, so agents can tell clients exactly where their application is in the council review process without having to chase for updates. Automatic confirmation emails on submission are also in the pipeline.

We are also working on guidance to help users select the correct application type, support for additional file formats alongside PDFs, an improved map interface for drawing site boundaries, a switch to a more accurate address provider, and the ability for agents to send payment links directly to applicants.

Underpinning a lot of this is a wider AI validation update: expanded document type support, improved accuracy and better handling of local requirements. That one has been a long time in the planning, and we are looking forward to sharing more!

Help shape what comes next

One of the things we talked about yesterday was the importance of building this with the people who use it, not just for them. We are forming a working group for early adopters: agents, planning consultants and council officers who want to be directly involved in what gets prioritised and built next. Members will be able to request features, test them ahead of wider release and give feedback directly to the product team. If you’d like to be a part, please get in touch here.  

Thank you to everyone who joined. Planning submission technology has been standing still for too long, and the fact that so many of you are here, using the platform, sharing feedback and pushing us to do better, is what makes this better. We are not taking that for granted!