Spotlight Interview: PlanningHub

In our latest Spotlight Interview, we spoke to Ewa Moskwiak Co-founder & CEO of PlanningHub. Ewa shares how PlanningHub is using AI and connected planning intelligence to simplify complex planning research, help organisations identify development opportunities and support the delivery of new homes across the UK."Generative AI, left to its own devices, doesn't stand much of a chance against the complexity of the planning system. And that's something I think gets lost in all the excitement around AI.Today, almost anyone can ask an AI agent a planning question and get a convincing answer in seconds."

Q1. PlanningHub has developed significantly since its launch. What inspired the creation of the business, and how has the company evolved as the platform and customer base have grown?

We have some of the most creative minds in the country working on shaping our built environment, yet we make them spend much of their time searching for information rather than creating places.

I know this frustration first hand. I'm an architect and planner by background, but I've also been actively involved in small-site development. My experience comes not just from advising on projects, but from actually trying to get homes built.

Creating homes and transforming places has always been my passion. But you quickly realise how much time gets swallowed up by navigating complex, fragmented planning systems. When you're researching 40 or 50 sites just to identify one with real development potential, that's an enormous amount of repetitive work. I kept thinking, surely there must be a better way?

That frustration became the starting point for PlanningHub. I brought those practical insights together with the technical expertise of our co-founder and CTO, Professor Harald Braun, who has extensive experience developing technology for high-trust environments.

With fantastic support from UKRI, our investors, MHCLG, Geovation, Ordnance Survey and HM Land Registry, and collaboration with partners including Enfield Council, Tower Hamlets and Aster Group, we started turning that vision into reality.

We've evolved from answering individual planning questions to helping organisations unlock entire housing delivery pipelines. But our motivation hasn't changed: giving talented people their time back to create better places and deliver the homes we need.

Q2. Planning information can involve searching across multiple sources. How does PlanningHub bring this information together to give users a more complete picture of a site?

The challenge with planning information isn't necessarily that the data doesn't exist. It's that it exists in many different places, in different formats, and rarely speaks to each other.

Planning doesn't work in isolation. To understand the development potential of a site, you need to understand the place, the proposed project and how different factors interact.

That's the thinking behind PlanningHub. We build context-aware systems where the site and the proposed development become the connecting thread between otherwise fragmented information.

In many ways, we're replicating how an experienced planning professional carries out research, but at a completely different speed and scale.

We bring together property information, planning policies, site constraints, environmental considerations, planning history and local precedents, connecting these elements to understand what they mean for a particular proposal.

A site might look promising based on its location and size, but once you consider its planning history and environmental constraints, a different picture can emerge. Equally, the same research might reveal opportunities that weren't immediately obvious.

Of course, planning data is far from perfect. Much of it is unstructured, inconsistent or incomplete. A significant part of our innovation involves structuring, standardising and enriching information by cross-referencing related datasets.

Data governance is fundamental. We prioritise traceability and make uncertainties and gaps visible rather than hiding them behind confident-looking answers.

Ultimately, we're not just bringing data together. We're helping people understand what a site could become, what might stand in the way and where the real opportunities lie.

Q3. How do you balance the speed of AI-generated insights with the level of accuracy and detail needed for planning decisions?

Generative AI, left to its own devices, doesn't stand much of a chance against the complexity of the planning system. And that's something I think gets lost in all the excitement around AI.

Today, almost anyone can ask an AI agent a planning question and get a convincing answer in seconds. The problem is that without understanding planning's nuances, you might not even realise when that answer is wrong or missing something critical.

What we've learnt is that these technologies can be incredibly powerful in high-trust environments, but only when used in a carefully structured way.

We curate the context, break complex assessments into smaller tasks, and connect and validate the outcomes. Every element needs to be traceable to its source. Otherwise, one incorrect assumption can create a ripple effect through the entire assessment.

We don't believe the traditional 80/20 approach is good enough for high-trust applications. Planning decisions have enormous social, environmental and financial consequences.

That's why we don't just let chatbots run loose on planning data. Behind a report generated in minutes are carefully designed workflows, multiple technologies, extensive prompt engineering, layers of validation and countless hours of in-house testing.

We're not trading accuracy for speed. We're engineering systems that deliver both, making evidence and uncertainty visible to support professional judgement.

Q4. PlanningHub is designed for both private-sector users and Local Planning Authorities. How does the solution adapt to the different needs of these two audiences?

One of the most interesting things about planning is that whether you're submitting an application or assessing one, you're often looking at the same information, asking similar questions and trying to understand the same place. Yet traditionally, we've approached these as two separate worlds.

What if both sides of the planning process could start from the same ground truth?

For applicants, that means greater certainty, better access to planning knowledge and the ability to understand opportunities and constraints before investing significant time and money.

For Local Planning Authorities, it means less repetitive research, more capacity for meaningful pre-application advice, better dialogue with applicants and more time for professional judgement.

The underlying intelligence can be shared, but how we deliver it adapts to the user. A homeowner considering an extension, a housing association assessing dozens of sites and a planning officer reviewing an application all need different levels of detail, workflows and outputs.

Our work on Section 106 agreements is a great example. These negotiations bring together multiple parties, often with different information, assumptions and priorities. Creating a shared, evidence-based starting point can make the process more transparent, informed and collaborative.

For me, this goes beyond efficiency. Knowledge is power, and democratising access to planning intelligence can lower barriers for smaller developers and community-led organisations while empowering planning authorities.

Applicants and planning authorities may sit on opposite sides of the table, but they don't have to start from opposite sides of the information.

If technology can give us a shared understanding of the facts, we can spend less time debating what we know and more time discussing what we should do with it.

Q5. Looking ahead, what's next for PlanningHub and are there any particular capabilities you are looking to bring into the platform next?

I think the next big opportunity for PlanningHub isn't necessarily about building more tools. It's about making the incredible technologies we already have work better together as part of a wider ecosystem.

That's where I see our future. We're developing technology that works independently but can also integrate with and enhance other platforms. Our planning intelligence can be delivered in both human-readable and machine-readable formats, supporting professional decisions while feeding directly into other systems and workflows.

Planning is our area of expertise, but it's only one part of the journey from identifying a development opportunity to delivering it. I believe the best outcomes will come from collaboration, where different technologies and organisations bring their strengths together.

And nowhere is that more important than in housing delivery. Projects rarely get delayed because of one isolated problem. It's often the accumulation of disconnected information, decisions and processes across multiple organisations. Improving individual steps helps but connecting them can make a much bigger difference.

That's why housing is our immediate priority. With the UK's ambition to deliver 1.5 million homes over five years, we're focusing on unlocking viable sites, supporting housing delivery pipelines, improving development management and tackling bottlenecks such as Section 106 agreements.

We don't measure success by how many tasks we automate, but by the capacity we release, the barriers we remove and the outcomes we help people achieve.