Digital Planning Maturity Assessment

The Digital Planning Maturity Assessment (DPMA) is a self-assessment developed with local planning authorities. It helps your authority reflect on how digital tools, data and ways of working support its planning service.

Choose your next step

Choose the guidance that matches where your authority is in the DPMA process.

Prepare for and complete the DPMA for the first time

Find out who to involve, how to prepare your responses and how to submit your authority’s first assessment.

Understand your results and create an action plan

Find out how to review your results with colleagues, agree priorities and plan what your authority will do next.

Repeat the DPMA

Review your previous results and action plan, reassess your planning service and understand what has changed.

Bring colleagues together to complete the DPMA

Completing the DPMA is a team exercise. One person should lead the process, but your authority will need input from colleagues who understand different parts of its planning service.

This may include colleagues working in planning, digital, IT, data, GIS, procurement, leadership and community engagement.

Use the guidance for completing or repeating the DPMA to find out who to involve and how to gather and agree your authority’s responses.

How the DPMA helps your authority

The DPMA includes 30 questions across 7 areas of digital maturity. It also asks 2 required questions about what your authority’s planning service does well in digital planning and what makes improvement difficult.

Your responses should reflect how your planning service works now, rather than what you plan to do in the future.

There are no right or wrong answers. The DPMA is an internal reflection tool, not a performance assessment.

Completing the DPMA can help your authority:

• understand its digital strengths and challenges
• identify where change may be needed
• understand the scale of that change
• agree realistic priorities
• create an action plan for the next 6 to 12 months
• review changes when it repeats the assessment

How your results are used

After submitting the assessment, your authority will receive a personalised results pack. It includes a summary of its results, suggested actions and an action-plan template.

The results pack will show your authority’s scores alongside the anonymised average for authorities that have completed the DPMA. This provides a benchmark to help you understand your results. It does not rank authorities or compare individual authorities with each other.

We will not publish your authority’s individual results without its consent.

Your authority’s individual responses are not used to assess its performance or decide whether it receives funding.

Open Digital Planning (ODP) may combine and anonymise results from multiple authorities to:

• create benchmarks
• understand changes in digital maturity
• improve the support it provides
• inform future funding proposals

Published analysis will not identify or rank individual authorities.