Innovation at the Centre: How Milton Keynes’ Planning Team Transformed with AI
In just two months, Valon shaved up to 18 days off decision times during the pilot. It proved to be a force multiplier for our planning team.
About Milton Keynes City Council
Milton Keynes is one of the UK's fastest-growing cities, with a planning service handling over 1700 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.
MKCC is a pro-growth city — “Better by Design” — with ambitions to deliver transformational change while protecting what is distinctive about Milton Keynes. The council's long-term strategy looks ahead to 2050, and the emerging Local Plan proposes around 60,000 new homes over the next 25 years to meet housing demand and drive economic growth. MKCC has also recently been named as one of the Government's preferred locations for a New Town, which could accelerate planned growth.
The Opportunity
Before Valon, validation relied on manual checks across large bundles of submitted documents. Officers were responsible for identifying sensitive information for redaction, checking fees, confirming red-line boundaries, and ensuring submissions met both national and MKCC’s local validation requirements — often by scanning plans and reports line by line.
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.
MKCC has trialled AI before. General tools like Copilot were not integrated into planning workflows or able to reflect the rules and legal parameters of casework. Earlier validation tooling trialled in 2018/19 also fell short due to the complexity of planning documents and drawings. The Valon pilot was designed specifically to overcome those constraints by integrating directly into the validation workflow.
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 closely with Valon’s engineering team throughout the pilot. Feedback from live applications directly informed prioritisation, with functionality such as automatic fee calculation, PII redaction and OS-linked red-line checking delivered in short, controlled cycles (typically within two weeks). This ensured the platform evolved in response to operational use rather than fixed specifications.
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 applying 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
As these efficiencies took effect, overall turnaround times reduced. Public register data shows that the period in which Valon was taken into regular use aligns with a marked reduction in the time taken for applications to move from receipt to validation. This pattern persisted as use of the system became more widespread.
“Early data suggests average validation turnaround decreased from around 15.8 days in early October to roughly 7.7 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 forms the core validation workflow. All submitted documents are ingested and processed within the platform, where plans and reports are classified, submissions are checked against MKCC’s local validation requirements, and potential issues such as missing plans, incomplete forms or inconsistencies between document titles and drawing labels are identified. Officers are kept in the loop to confirm these findings, applying professional judgement before any action is taken.
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.
Lessons from the Pilot
“Our ambition is to show other local planning authorities — including those hesitant to make the leap into the truly digital age — that it CAN be done.”
The pilot did not simply accelerate an existing process. It exposed how much of the planning system’s delay was concentrated at the front door, driven by manual document handling rather than professional judgement. Removing that burden released capacity immediately, without increasing headcount.
For MKCC, this has reset expectations. Validation is no longer treated as an unavoidable administrative cost, but as a workflow that can and should be supported with automation. Officer time is now reserved for decision-making, policy application, and the quality of development — the work that inspires them.