Prepare for and complete the DPMA for the first time

The Digital Planning Maturity Assessment (DPMA) covers digital skills, technology, data, procurement, leadership, ways of working and community engagement within your authority’s planning service. One person is unlikely to have all the information needed to complete it.

You will get the most value from the assessment by involving colleagues who understand how different parts of your planning service work.

Before you start the DPMA

You should gather and agree your authority’s responses before opening the online assessment.

Once you have prepared your responses, the online assessment usually takes around 40 minutes to complete. It cannot be saved after you start, so the person submitting it must complete it in one session.

You will also need your authority’s 9-character Office for National Statistics (ONS) code.

Nominate someone to lead the process

Choose someone to coordinate the assessment and submit the agreed responses.

The DPMA lead should:

• agree a timeframe for preparing the assessment
• identify the colleagues who need to contribute
• share the question guide
• collect and record responses
• arrange any discussions needed to agree the answers
• complete and submit the online assessment
• share the results with colleagues when they are received

The lead does not need to know every answer. Their role is to bring together the right information and make sure the authority agrees its responses.

Involve the right colleagues

The question guide suggests which colleagues may be able to contribute to each part of the assessment.

You do not need to involve everyone in every question. Ask people to contribute where they understand how that part of the planning service works in practice.

You can gather responses by:

• sharing the relevant pages of the question guide with colleagues
• asking people to review the questions and provide evidence or suggested responses
• recording responses in the question guide and saving it in a shared folder
• booking an online or in-person meeting to discuss the questions
• reading through the questions as a group and agreeing the responses together

Choose an approach that works for your authority and make sure all responses are returned to the DPMA lead.

Prepare and agree your responses

Download the question guide before starting the online assessment.

You can share the guide with colleagues who do not have access to the Open Digital Planning Hub.

Download the Digital Planning Maturity Assessment question guide

Use it to:

• read all the questions in advance
• identify who can contribute to each part
• gather evidence and different perspectives
• decide which statement best reflects how your planning service works now
• record provisional responses
• discuss and agree the final answers

Base your responses on current practice rather than future plans.

The guide also includes space to prepare optional context about your scores.

You will also need to prepare responses about:

• what your authority’s planning service does well in digital planning
• the challenges that make it difficult for the service to improve digital planning

The online assessment will ask for these responses alongside your scores.

Find your authority’s ONS code

You will need your authority’s 9-character ONS code to complete the online assessment.

To find it:

1. Go to Explore local statistics on the ONS website.
2. Enter your council’s name.
3. Select your council from the results.
4. Copy the code displayed after its name, for example E08000031.

Keep the code with your agreed responses so it is available when you start the form.

What happens after you submit

We will send a personalised results pack to the person who submitted the assessment. This will normally be within 10 working days of the submission deadline given to your authority.

The person who receives the pack should save it somewhere relevant colleagues can access securely.

The next step is to review the results with colleagues, agree your authority’s priorities and complete the action-plan template included in the pack.

Understand your results and create an action plan