Planning teams across the country are under growing pressure, facing growing backlogs, tight deadlines, and staffing constraints. Milton Keynes City Council (MKCC) responded to these pressures by piloting Valon, an AI platform designed to support planning officers from validation through to decision, for 3 months from October to December 2025.
The product
Valon is built specifically for Local Planning Authorities. It automates the validation of planning applications and supports development management work through tools including comment summarisation and precedent research. It is designed to surface relevant information for officer review, which allows officers to focus on exercising their professional judgement.
To integrate the product, Valon connected directly to the public planning register to retrieve application data and documents. This meant that no changes to existing infrastructure were required for officers to connect to and use the platform.
Getting started
The pilot was coordinated by the Digital Planning Lead and Planning Projects Manager, who nominated a pilot group from the validation and development management teams. Valon provided onboarding and training throughout, and a dedicated Teams channel hosted regular feedback sessions used to track progress, address issues in real time, and shape next steps.
Before the pilot began, MKCC completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment, reviewed and signed off by their Data Protection and IT teams. Officers were asked not to submit documents containing sensitive personal information during the initial phase, and Valon's Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001 certification were verified as part of the council's due diligence.
Impact
Officers reported validating applications 60–80% faster than before, with the largest time savings on more complex cases. Analysis of the public planning register pointed to measurable improvements across the pipeline: receipt-to-validation times fell from 15.8 to 7.6 days, and validation-to-decision times improved from 53.1 to 43.2 days over the pilot period. Based on an estimated 80% time saving on validation work, MKCC calculated that approximately 1,360 officer hours per year could be redirected to other casework.
Officer engagement was strong: several officers became daily users during the pilot, and the cohort chose to continue using the platform voluntarily after the formal pilot period concluded.
Key takeaways
Human in the loop
Officer judgement, not AI, is behind every decision.
Low-friction entry points
Valon required no infrastructure changes, which removed a barrier that can slow adoption.
Evaluations
MKCC used timesheets and register data to build an evidence base throughout the pilot.
What's next
After completing the pilot, MKCC procured a one-year licence and officers continue to use Valon actively. Integration work with Arcus, the council's back-office planning system, is currently being scoped between Valon and Arcus Global, and is expected to reduce the manual steps officers currently take between the two systems and unlock further automation capability. The longer-term ambition is a full rollout to all planning officers.