This started, like a lot of things, with frustration. At the housing crisis — its scale, its entrenchment, its quiet normalisation. At the planning system — not because it's corrupt or malicious, but because it so often feels like it can’t see itself clearly. At the way well-meaning decisions turn into inertia. At how much energy goes into defending forms that no longer produce their supposed outcomes.
I’m not a housing campaigner by background. But it’s hard to live in the UK and not feel the weight of it: rents spiralling, homelessness rising, political language drifting ever further from material delivery. You look at housing supply, affordability ratios, land use data — and then you look at the actual workflows inside planning departments — and the disconnect becomes hard to ignore.
The tools I’m building here aren’t going to solve that. But they’re my way of taking it seriously. Of asking how planning might become more transparent, more legible, more grounded in reality — without collapsing under the weight of its own procedures.
It’s not about efficiency for its own sake. It’s about capacity: human, institutional, cognitive. About helping planning officers spend less time copy-pasting and more time exercising real judgement. About helping policy teams trace delivery failure not just reactively but systematically. About making it harder to pretend the problem is just “the market,” or “NIMBYs,” or “red tape,” when often it’s all three — refracted through layers of drift, contradiction, and fog.
This work isn’t neutral. But it isn’t partisan either. It’s aligned — with those trying to get homes built, with those trying to reform the system from inside, with those who think public decisions should be able to explain themselves.
That’s the motivation: not to replace planning, but to support it in doing what it’s supposed to do — clearly, credibly, and with less room for the kind of failure that hides in plain sight.