Innovation at the Centre: How Milton Keynes’ Planning Team Transformed with AI
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About Milton Keynes City Council
Milton Keynes is one of the UK’s fastest-growing cities, with a planning service handling over two thousand applications each year. The Planning & Development team is responsible for managing growth across new neighbourhoods, strategic sites and town-centre regeneration, while maintaining service quality and meeting national performance targets.
As an early adopter of Arcus Global and an active participant in Open Digital Planning, Milton Keynes City Council (MKCC) has built a reputation as one of the country’s most forward-thinking planning authorities. The Valon project sits within this wider programme of modernisation.
The Opportunity
Before Valon, validation relied on manual checks across dozens of documents per application. Officers had to redact sensitive information, confirm constraints, fees, red-line boundaries, policy triggers and document completeness by hand. For complex major schemes, this could take several hours per case.
At the same time, application volumes and staffing pressures meant backlogs could quickly build. Leadership saw an opportunity to explore whether AI could reduce the administrative burden of validation without moving the problem onto the case officers.
The Solution: AI-Assisted Validation
MKCC partnered with Valon to deploy an AI-assisted workflow for application validation. The project focused first on the stages that consume the most officer time: reading and classifying documents, checking against national and local validation lists, assessing red-line boundaries and verifying fees.
The validation support team and planning officers worked directly with the Valon engineering team to iterate on their needs. Features such as automatic fee calculation, PII redaction and OS-linked red-line checking were prioritised and shipped within days of officer requests, ensuring the tool evolved around real cases rather than abstract requirements.
Impact at a Glance
Within the first weeks of the pilot, MKCC began to see measurable improvements in both task-level efficiency and overall service performance.
From Hour-Long Checks to Minutes
Prior to implementation, validation for major applications typically required around 65 minutes of focused officer time. This included checking application forms, scanning drawings for key information, cross-checking constraints, and verifying fees.
With Valon handling much of the document reading and rule-based checking, officers now spend roughly 10 minutes per major application confirming details and exercising professional judgement. For non-major cases, active validation time has similarly fallen from around 15 minutes to approximately 5.
Validation Time per Case (Minutes)
Department-Wide Velocity
These task-level efficiencies have begun to translate into faster overall turnaround times. Analysis of the public register shows a clear correlation between the ramp-up of Valon usage in early October and the days taken for applications to move from receipt to validation.
“Early data suggests average validation turnaround decreased from around 15.8 days in early October to roughly 8.2 days in early November, despite steady application volumes.”
Pilot Impact: Volume vs Turnaround Time
How Milton Keynes Uses Valon Day-to-Day
For validation officers, Valon acts as an intelligent first pass. The system reads every submitted document, classifies plans and reports, checks them against MKCC’s local validation list, and flags potential issues such as missing plans, incomplete forms or inconsistencies between titles and drawing labels.
For planning officers, Valon provides deeper context. Similar applications and delegated reports are surfaced automatically, public comments can be summarised by theme and sentiment, and an AI assistant allows officers to query application documents in natural language when preparing reports and recommendations.
Speed Without Losing Control
Throughout the pilot, MKCC kept professional judgement firmly at the centre of the process. Valon provides structured recommendations with clickable evidence links back to the underlying documents, so officers can verify each suggestion before acting on it.
Automated PII redaction has also strengthened compliance. The tool reliably identifies sensitive information such as signatures, phone numbers and certain protected-species references, ensuring they can be redacted before publication on the public register.
A New Foundation for Digital Planning
The benefits of the pilot go beyond efficiency metrics. Validation officers report less time spent on repetitive checks and more time available for the judgement calls that genuinely require their expertise. The success of the pilot has also attracted wider interest: MKCC’s experience with Valon has been featured in national digital planning forums and has already prompted outreach from other public bodies.
Building on this foundation, MKCC and Valon are now exploring deeper integration with Arcus and the extension of AI-assisted workflows further along the development management process, from delegated reports to conditions and beyond.