Why AI can’t replace your planning consultant

About this episode

JMS Planning is HolidaymakerXP’s newest partner, and this episode is as much a reintroduction as it is a first meeting. Daniel worked alongside Dave McRobbie in the leisure and tourism sector before joining JMS in January 2026, tasked with leading and expanding the firm’s work across parks, hotels and visitor attractions. JMS was founded by Julian Sutton and works from offices in London and Ceredigion, Wales, a 15-person team that already counts Greggs, Shell, MFG and GMT among its clients across residential, commercial, infrastructure and energy work. Daniel’s brief is to bring that same pragmatic, practical approach to the leisure sector specifically.

Dan and Dave talk through what’s actually landing on operators’ desks right now: energy costs, rising national insurance and minimum wage, competition from overseas package holidays pulling guests back to short city breaks, and the ongoing tension in second-home hotspots like Cornwall and Scotland, where housing need and holiday-let demand are pulling against each other. None of it is unique to planning, but planning is where it all has to be reconciled into a decision.

The £78bn opportunity, and what’s changing in the NPPF

The headline number from the episode: the rural tourism and leisure sector generated an estimated £78 billion in 2025. It’s the context behind the biggest planning story operators haven’t necessarily clocked yet, a redraft of the National Planning Policy Framework, expected after the summer parliamentary recess, that shifts from two paragraphs on rural business and tourism to what Daniel counts as five or six policies under the new Policy S5.

In practice, that means a more pro-growth starting position for rural leisure development: applications inside or outside a settlement boundary assessed against whether adverse effects (landscape and visual impact, ecology, biodiversity net gain, highways, drainage, flooding) substantially outweigh the benefits, rather than starting from a more restrictive default. Daniel flags the caveat: national policy is one thing, but local political control has shifted significantly since May’s local elections, and how individual councils apply the new framework will vary.

Why AI can’t replace your planning consultant

Daniel is candid that AI is already useful in his day-to-day work: transcribing meetings, helping navigate dense or ambiguous policy wording, and supporting scenario modelling on flooding, drainage and biodiversity from the consultants JMS works alongside. Local authorities are using it too, for validation checks on new applications, and government is looking at it to speed up the local plan process.

What it can’t do, in Daniel’s view, is weigh genuinely competing factors on a complex site and make the judgement call that balances a client’s needs against a community’s and a local authority’s. That’s the job. It’s also why the Planning Inspectorate now requires anyone using AI in an appeal or local plan submission to disclose where and how it was used, after seeing submissions that were effectively AI output passed straight through. Dave’s take from the operator side echoes it: the clients he’s speaking to aren’t asking to hand everything to a chatbot, they’re asking thoughtful questions about how AI can free up their own teams to spend more time with guests.