End-to-end digital planning solution for Local Development Plan consultations
Welcome to OpusConsult
The trusted digital planning platform that simplifies consultation and planning policy management, improves productivity, and reduces costs.
From evidence gathering, plan drafting, consulting, to Local Plan or Neighbourhood Plan adoption, the suite of digital engagement tools within the OpusConsult platform have it all planned out for you.
All your consultations covered
OpusConsult functionality provides everything you will need to streamline and manage every consultation stage for a Call for Sites, Local Development Plan, Neighbourhood Plan, Minerals and Waste Plan, or any other policy plan that the authority needs to produce.
Value for money
Our tech provides tremendous value with the Software as a Service license affordably priced, suiting all councils who are keen to maximise return on spend including the smallest of Local Planning Authorities with very limited budgets.
Local Authority branded with speedy implementation
The consultation platform, with your styling (including logo and brand colours), will be ready for you and your team to utilise within a matter of days of partnering with us, with ongoing assistance available from our friendly Support team.
Continuous software updates at no extra cost
Our continuous release policy means that we are regularly adding features and functions to the software (at no extra cost) to ensure it keeps pace with changes in guidance on Local Plans and Planning Policy.
Transform the relationship between the community, planning authority and developers
The efficient and user-friendly OpusConsult planning system is a platform of choice for Planning Policy teams to reach, engage, analyse, and collaborate.
The public interface is intuitive and accessible for the community encouraging increased meaningful engagement from a diverse range of people, helping you to achieve your inclusivity goals.
When uploading your documents for you, we will ensure they meet Web Content Accessibility standards.
Reduce the burden of manual processing with interactive and dynamic online documents
For participant ease of use and to save time with analysis, your online Local Plan documents can allow representations to be submitted against specific sections, including document headers, paragraphs, policies, and maps.
By using OpusConsult for your public consultations, you will accelerate the time it takes to manage, process, and respond to potentially thousands of online representations that are likely to be submitted by developers, planning agents and residents.
While the platform encourages online participation for data centralisation, representations can be manually uploaded with speed and ease too.
Publish interactive maps with a Local Plan
When you opt for seamless OpusMap integration with OpusConsult, you can easily create and link any number of interactive maps and capture site submission polygons directly on the map, where sites can be queried against your constraint layers instantly. Ideal for Call for Sites consultations, it makes site submission, analysis, and team collaboration a breeze.
Drive better informed decision-making with instant reports
To deliver the developments communities want in their local areas, the intuitive OpusConsult admin console provides you with instant access to your high-quality data insights in real-time, to help drive better informed local planning authority decision-making. The data you capture and customisable reports and statistics will result in solid and dependable documented evidence that you will need for final submission to the Planning Inspector.
Customer Reviews
The experience we've had working with JDi on the preparation of the Local Plan has been very positive. The product they have in OpusConsult provides a very effective way to manage documents, comments, and responses during consultations. The support received has always been quick, with queries dealt with efficiently.
Senior Planning Policy Officer, Rutland County Council
South Cambridgeshire District Council have worked with JDi Solutions on many different projects over many years and have found the JDi team to be professional, forward thinking, honest and highly skilled in everything they do.
GIS & Information Manager, South Cambridgeshire District Council
Throughout the eight years we have worked with JDi Solutions on our minerals and waste Local Plan consultations, they have always provided us with excellent customer support and a very quick, reliable service!
Planning Policy Team, Nottinghamshire County Council
We understand the financial budget pressures on councils, so we keep our pricing straightforward and affordable, enabling you to plan and achieve your budgetary goals. A fixed low-cost annual license subscription fee will provide you with access to use the consultation system for everything from a single-use project to departmental or corporate-wide adoption or, if required, use across a local partnership.
How secure is my data and where will it be hosted?
You own all the data collected. Our robust security keeps it safe.
All of our cloud-based services are securely hosted in the EU. Data is encrypted at rest and backed-up to a separate hosting provider within the EU.
We take the security, performance and reliability of our systems very seriously and we partner with some of the best in the business to deliver the highest quality service to our customers. Our EU based servers are maintained by world class server hosts Amazon AWS, and our Drupal sites take advantage of industry leading Linux server management and expertise from Code Enigma.
We’re 100% GDPR compliant, registered under the UK Data Protection Act and have appointed a board-level data protection officer.
Does the service comply with web accessibility standards?
The service conforms to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) Level AA.
To access the service, staff and stakeholders only need to use a modern web browser on an internet connected device. No software downloads are required.
How long does it take to get started?
Following a formal order and your kick-off meeting we will speedily make your Local Authority branded consultation software available for use and provide you with comprehensive support to get your first consultation up and running.
There’s no software to install, so no extra work for your IT team.
We will coordinate with you to arrange convenient times when all relevant council colleagues can attend virtual meetings for 4 x 2hr group training sessions, aimed to help you and your team to get the most out of the functionality and flexibility that OpusConsult offers.
Your dedicated customer success manager and the wider support team will guide you through platform set up, adoption and ongoing use. Utilising our wealth of experience and knowledge of best practice, we want to help you to efficiently achieve your Local Development Plan goals.
