About us

Designed for planners. Funded by UK Government. Powered by Unboxed.

The BOPS story

BOPS was conceived in 2018 by a team of forward-thinking Local Planning Authorities to transform the way that planning applications are processed.

Planning officers often struggled with outdated, paper-based, and fragmented back-office processes. This led to inefficiencies, delays in application processing, inconsistent data, and a lack of transparency for both internal staff and the public.

There was a need for a more modern, digital approach.

Working with Unboxed, a group of pioneering councils, used funding from the Local Digital Fund for a Discovery phase to research and identify opportunities to co-design a back office system that made planners' lives easier.

Read more about the Local Digital Fund

Open Digital Planning

The UK Government, via the Ministry of Communities, Housing and Local Government (MHCLG) recognised these opportunities and created Open Digital Planning. This programme offers funding and support to help councils across England to benefit from better technology, data and working practices.

Over several years, the ODP community has grown to include hundreds of councils. Unboxed works with these councils to research, codesign and test every feature in BOPS.

Through ODP, BOPS also benefits from being part of an integrated, end to end product family, from PlanX (making it easier to apply for planning) to the Digital Planning Register.

Our principles

  • Data over documents

    A system driven by data, reducing mistakes and time spent on manual tasks.

  • Open, standardised data

    We've worked with the UK Government to establish standards that make it easier for local government to access planning data, whenever and wherever they need it.

  • Collaboration and transparency

    We share all of our code openly so that any council can benefit from the work we're doing. Product delivery is led by planners from our partner councils and we invite collaboration, feedback and challenge at every step.

Owned by councils

We're working with MHCLG to establish an innovative business model for BOPS. We want BOPS to be:

  • owned and managed by councils

  • constantly improving through feedback loops with partners

  • integrated with the best products on the market

  • working for everyone, with upgrades developed and rolled out to all users as standard

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