The PropTech Innovation Fund is MHCLG’s flagship programme to support testing and scaling digital innovation across the planning and housebuilding process. At the core of the fund is collaboration across tech companies, local authorities, industry, community organisations, and academia, leveraging technology to improve the way places are designed, planned, and built.

The Fund was introduced in July 2021 to enable the UK’s PropTech sector and local planning authorities to work together across key planning and housing challenges like planning consultations, land assessment, and infrastructure modelling. To date, the fund has supported 100+ collaborative pilots, contributing to the growing evidence base about PropTech’s potential for improving planning and housebuilding across the UK.

You can find information about previous rounds 1-4 of funding here and round 5 here, where PropTech companies have worked with public and private partners to leverage frontier technology like AI and digital twins to tackle bottlenecks in site identification, viability assessment, consultation analysis, and more.

Round 6 of the fund is being co-delivered by MHCLG’s Digital Planning Programme and PUBLIC. At the core of this round is a focus on scaling proven innovation in planning and housing delivery alongside existing government-wide projects by enabling collaboration between technology companies, local authorities, industry, community organisations, and/or academia.

This Round is an 8-month challenge-led competition for a total grant of £2.4 million - to accelerate the development, testing and adoption of scalable digital approaches to identifying, assessing, and progressing land for housing delivery.

What is the PropTech Innovation Fund?

Challenge Statements

Round 6 of the PropTech Innovation Fund will be tackling systemic barriers to planning and housebuilding through the adoption, embedding and scaling of innovative PropTech solutions - ultimately supporting the planning system to deliver 1.5 million homes in this Parliament.

This round focuses on two challenges:

How can scalable digital approaches help align evidence and policies across different plan-making boundaries and tiers?

Challenge 1

How can digital interventions reduce delays caused by Section 106 negotiations (e.g. viability) to accelerate local authority decision-making on applications?

Challenge 2

For an overview of the research conducted to select the challenge statements; from our research design, key findings, and prioritisation matrix, to selecting and validating each challenge, you can read our Discovery Report here.

Attachment 1. Questions about your consortium - to be completed by applicants and submit as attachment Attachment 2. Budget and Match Funding Template - to be completed by applicants and submit as attachment Attachment 3. Questions about your proposed solution - this is to help applicants to develop and collaborate on your proposal prior to the deadline. Please note that all applications must be submitted through the online application portal on Judgify.