The Spatial Ledger is an open-source audit framework developed to enable comparative analysis of planning policy performance across local authorities β with particular attention to housing delivery, spatial allocations, and the structural coherence of Local Plans. Its core premise is that although plans articulate formal commitments, the consistency and credibility of those commitments vary significantly between jurisdictions, and there is currently little structured infrastructure to examine those differences.
Local Plans are understood here not simply as regulatory artefacts but as situated expressions of institutional strategy β articulating a locally specific synthesis of evidence, ambition, political compromise, and statutory constraint. Their form is procedural; their content is contingent. Yet in public discourse, plans often appear interchangeable, equally authoritative, or equally βin compliance.β The Spatial Ledger aims to unsettle that equivalence by foregrounding how planning intentions diverge in structure, delivery assumptions, and internal consistency across space β and, in some cases, by exposing the absence of a meaningful plan altogether.
While the existence of a Local Plan is formally mandated, the reality is that many authorities are operating with outdated, partial, or lapsed strategies. Some have withdrawn or stalled emerging plans; others rely heavily on speculative updates without a coherent spatial narrative. The Spatial Ledger treats this absence not as a missing value but as a finding in itself β a signal of institutional pressure, political impasse, or procedural exhaustion. In such cases, the Ledger documents not only what is said, but what is no longer being said.
The Ledger works by extracting structured representations of plan logic β including site allocations, phasing assumptions, strategic objectives, and spatial narratives β and comparing these across multiple authorities. It draws on publicly available monitoring data, housing delivery evidence, and textual analysis of plan documents to identify systematic divergences: between what is stated and what is delivered, and between plans that adopt similar policy language but differ markedly in performance or coherence. This is not a longitudinal evaluation of change over time, but a comparative, spatialised examination of institutional form β designed to reveal how different planning cultures articulate, structure, and sustain their strategic commitments, or fail to do so.
This approach draws from a view of planning texts as performative documents β as instruments that consolidate and communicate institutional intent, but which are also shaped by local capacity, political context, and path dependency. The Spatial Ledger does not assume that divergence from stated aims is inherently negative. Rather, it treats variation itself as an object of inquiry β a way of understanding how the planning system distributes discretion, risk, and accountability across space.
The project is informed by literatures in urban policy analysis, institutional geography, and comparative spatial planning β especially those concerned with the unevenness of state capacity and the governance of delivery. It is aligned with a broader epistemological aim: to develop open, interpretable infrastructure that enables the planning system to be analysed not only as policy, but as a spatial and institutional artefact. The Ledger is not a scoring mechanism. It is a tool for structured observation β designed to support more critical, comparative, and reflexive engagement with the promises embedded in planning documents and the material geographies that follow.