Category: 3. Business

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

The planning challenge

Local plan consultations can generate large volumes of responses in multiple formats, including emails, PDFs, documents and portal submissions. Officers often spend weeks copying comments into spreadsheets, splitting long submissions into topics, assigning work to colleagues and drafting consistent replies. This slows down the consultation process and limits the time available for community engagement and plan making.

Hounslow and Chesterfield wanted to:

• reduce the time spent processing responses
• improve consistency and transparency when managing comments across consultations
• give officers clearer tools for tagging, assigning and analysing responses
• link representations directly to sites and evidence files
• build a system that could be reused for future consultations and integrated with their existing sites database

What they did

The councils worked together to design and test new consultation response management software within the PlaceMaker platform.

To develop the tool, they:

• worked with Urban Intelligence to map the end-to-end process for handling consultation comments
• identified pain points such as copying comments manually, splitting long representations into topics and maintaining consistency across consultations
• refined the scope with support from service designers, focusing on representation processing and the preparation of consultation statements
• ran weekly design and development sessions with the supplier to iterate quickly
• tested functionality during Hounslow’s live consultation on a supplementary planning document (SPD), with Chesterfield carrying out early testing ahead of its local plan consultation

The new features developed through the pilot included:

• processing responses received in multiple formats
• automatically splitting long responses into sub-representations
• tagging comments by theme, policy or site
• assigning topics to individual officers
• applying shared response templates
• attaching GIS (geographic information system) layers and site information to comments
• creating a single database of representations across consultations

This gave officers more information in one place and reduced the amount of manual processing required.

Results and impact

The pilot led to measurable improvements in efficiency and consistency. Hounslow found that:

• processing time fell from 55 minutes per comment to 30 minutes
• the new features cut officer time spent tagging and categorising comments by 45%
• shared templates improved consistency across teams
• linking GIS layers and sites to comments gave officers better context
• the shared contact database could be reused for later consultations
• officers could assign topics and track work in one place, improving coordination

What they learned

The councils found that:

• using digital tools can significantly reduce the time spent processing representations
• summarising and tagging comments still requires officer judgement and could benefit from AI in future
• frequent collaboration with suppliers supports faster iteration
• a single database of responses improves consistency and makes it easier to compare feedback across consultations
• defining scope early is important, as initial plans were too broad
• having user experience and interface design support helped translate needs into workable features

Future plans

Both councils intend to use the new system for future consultations and explore additional automation, including AI assisted tagging and summarising. They also plan to refine how responses are fed directly into the tool through integrated consultation modules, reducing manual copying and splitting. Chesterfield will complete live testing during its next consultation. The councils are exploring how this functionality could be expanded to other planning tasks and potentially across wider council services.

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• EBRD providing three loans totalling €4 million to Intesa Sanpaolo Banka Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Loans will improve access to green finance and support youth- and women-led businesses
• Package of loans will promote inclusive and sustainable growth

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is providing three loans totalling €4 million to Intesa Sanpaolo Banka Bosnia and Herzegovina to encourage green investments in the residential sector, boost youth entrepreneurship and support women-led businesses in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This package of loans comprises the following:

• A €2 million loan under the Western Balkans Green Economy Financing Facility (GEFF)*: This loan will be lent on to the residential sector, supporting access to finance for energy-saving investments. Beneficiaries will include individual residents, housing collectives, housing management companies, service providers, producers and vendors of green technologies and materials, construction companies and the public sector. Eligible sub-borrowers will be able to receive incentive grants totalling up to 20 per cent of their sub-loans from the European Union (EU) on successful completion of their projects, with technical assistance funded by Japan and the EU supporting effective implementation.
• A €1 million loan under the Western Balkans Youth in Business programme: This loan will be lent on to eligible youth-led or -owned micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). This transaction aims to facilitate financial inclusion for young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, improving access to finance for MSMEs owned or led by young people, which often face barriers on account of factors such as insufficient collateral, limited credit history or lack of business experience.
• A €1 million loan under Phase II of the Western Balkans Women in Business programme: This loan will be lent on to eligible women-led MSMEs, seeking to foster women’s entrepreneurship and encourage broader participation in business by enhancing women-led MSMEs’ access to finance and know-how.

In addition to providing finance, the Women in Business and Youth in Business programmes also engage with young business owners and managers, giving them access to tailored advisory services that help them develop new skills, improve the performance of their businesses and unlock new growth opportunities. This advisory support is backed by the EU and the governments of Sweden (through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency), Luxembourg and Italy (through the Central European Initiative).

The loan agreements were signed by Stela Melnic, the EBRD’s Director of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Michele Castoro, President of the Management Board of Intesa Sanpaolo Banka, and Minja Filipović, a member of the Management Board.

Stela Melnic said: “We are proud to be expanding our support for inclusive and green finance in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These loans to Intesa Sanpaolo Banka underline our commitment to empowering women and young entrepreneurs, while accelerating the green transition and fostering sustainable growth across the country.”

Michele Castoro added: “This partnership with the EBRD represents another important step in strengthening our role as a driver of positive change in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through these new loan facilities, we can further support investments in energy efficiency, as well as young and women-led businesses that are shaping the future of our economy. We value the continued trust placed in our bank and remain committed to delivering sustainable impact and meaningful opportunities for our clients and communities.”

Intesa Sanpaolo Banka Bosnia and Herzegovina is the fifth largest bank in Bosnia and Herzegovina. With headquarters in Sarajevo, it services the entirety of the country through electronic channels and a network of 43 branches.

The EBRD’s Women in Business and Youth in Business programmes are supported by the EU, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance and bilateral donors to the Western Balkans Investment Framework (WBIF) and are implemented in partnership with the Energy Community Secretariat.

The EBRD has invested €3.4 billion across 254 projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina since it began operating there in 1996. The Bank’s strategic priorities in the country are to promote the green economy, support the competitive development of the private sector and foster regional integration.

* The EBRD’s Western Balkans GEFF is co-funded by the EU (through the WBIF), Austria, Japan and Denmark, as well as Austria and Switzerland through the EBRD’s High-Impact Partnership on Climate Action (HIPCA)**.

** HIPCA is supported by Austria, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the TaiwanICDF, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

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Japan’s benchmark government bond yields hit their highest level since 1999 after the central bank pushed up short-term interest rates to address rising prices and wages.

The Bank of Japan raised its policy rate by 0.25 percentage points to “around 0.75 per cent”, a three-decade high, and signalled its readiness to continue monetary tightening if conditions are right.

The rate increase, a unanimous decision by the bank’s Policy Board, was the fourth under governor Kazuo Ueda, continuing a “normalisation” process he launched last year.

The rate is the highest since 1995 as Japan emerges from decades when it maintained an ultra-loose monetary policy to try to fight deflation.

Despite the prospect of further rate increases, the yen weakened against the dollar following the BoJ’s move.

Traders said the move reflected market concerns around Japan’s fiscal situation under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who took office in October and has proposed expansive spending plans.

In a press conference Ueda said the new 0.75 per cent interest rate level was still “far from the bottom” of the central bank’s estimated range for the “neutral rate” — the level where monetary policy is neither expansionary nor contractionary.

“Our estimate on Japan’s neutral rate sits on a pretty wide range. It’s hard to set a pinpoint estimate . . . We’d ​like to look at how the economy and prices react to each change in short-term rate,” said Ueda.

Friday’s rate rise was widely anticipated after what traders said was unusually clear messaging ahead of the decision. A less telegraphed rate increase in July 2024 caused severe market ructions.

Hiroshi Shiraishi, senior economist at BNP Paribas in Tokyo, said Ueda had raised market expectations earlier in the month that he might be more explicit about BoJ estimates of the neutral rate. “In the event, he didn’t really say anything very new: he didn’t want to sound too hawkish and upset the government, or sound too dovish and cause the yen to fall . . . the market reaction is exactly as expected,” said Shiraishi.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year Japanese government bond climbed 0.05 percentage points, breaking through 2 per cent and reaching the highest level since 1999. Bond yields move inversely to prices.

Yields on JGBs had already risen to multiyear highs in recent weeks, driven by anticipation of the BoJ’s move and investor concerns that Japan’s fiscal position will be stretched by Takaichi’s spending plans.

The yen weakened to ¥156.77 against the dollar.

Andrew Pease, Asia-Pacific head of investments for Russell Investments, said the yen’s move was “a puzzle” but could suggest the market was potentially “worried about the fiscal dynamics in Japan”.

The market “is underestimating the potential for the Bank of Japan to tighten more aggressively next year”, Pease added.

Shoki Omori, chief desk strategist at Mizuho, said: “There was some disappointment in the market that the BoJ’s statement was not more hawkish, but the central bank does seem to have handled this very smoothly this time.”

He added that by remaining vague on the neutral rate, the BoJ appeared to have struck a balance to prevent markets from unduly front-running further rate increases. “It is therefore appropriate to characterise the current posture as hawkish in action and moderate in communication,” said Omori.

The BoJ statement noted that labour conditions in Japan, where the population is shrinking, continued to be tight, while corporate profits were expected to remain strong despite the impact of tariff policies.

The central bank said companies were “highly likely” to keep raising wages next year and that prices would continue to rise moderately.

Those conditions justified the adjustment of monetary policy, it said, a move that some economists judged to be at odds with Takaichi’s sweeping economic stimulus plans.

The BoJ observed that “real interest rates are expected to remain significantly negative after the change in the policy interest rate, and accommodative financial conditions will continue to firmly support economic activity”.

Headline consumer price inflation has been above the BoJ’s target level of 2 per cent for more than three years, driven by the yen’s weakness and Japan’s dependence on imports of food and energy. Official data on Friday showed consumer prices excluding fresh food rose 3 per cent in November from a year earlier.

Additional reporting by William Sandlund and data visualisation by Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong