A couple of weeks ago I wrote about GeoScreen taking a site boundary or a route instead of a single point. For a route, that meant chainage throughout the report, so a flood zone reads as a stretch of the route rather than a distance from a pin. For a route, the next question is
A screening report gets read in a hurry. Someone wants to know whether a site has a problem, why, and where to look next. Over the last couple of weeks I've made three changes to GeoScreen reports aimed at exactly that: getting from the rating to the evidence behind it, and from the report to
Until now, every GeoScreen report has started from a single point. You type an address or a grid reference, drag the pin if it's in the wrong place, and the report searches outwards from there. That works for a house plot. It doesn't really work for a 20 hectare housing site, a solar farm or
GeoScreen now covers Scotland. You can order a report for any site in England, Wales or Scotland, at the same price, with the same hazard ratings and the same 18 figures. When we added Wales in the summer, most of the work was swapping data sources: Natural Resources Wales instead of the Environment Agency, Cadw
More data doesn't automatically make an assessment better — it depends on what the extra data is actually doing. A few different things get lumped under "more data," and they're not all the same kind of improvement. Coverage is the obvious one. No single public dataset covers everything a site assessment needs — flood risk,
Compressible ground and shrink-swell clay are two different ways the same clay can cause problems for a foundation — one's settlement under load, the other's volume change with moisture content. They're separate failure mechanisms, and until recently GeoScreen rated them from different evidence: shrink-swell from the bedrock beneath a site, compressible ground only from soft
Every rating GeoScreen produces comes from an explicit rule, not a guess. That's the whole idea the product's built on, so it's worth actually explaining what sits behind that claim rather than just stating it and moving on. Before a report reaches anyone, it goes through two checks. One is rule-based and checks the output
Every GeoScreen tier runs on the same idea — an explicit rule behind every rating, not a guess. Tier 2 has been in development for a while now, and it's worth actually explaining why, rather than leaving it as "coming soon." The obvious answer — it just needs an engineer's time on top of what
GeoScreen has, until now, been an England-only product. That was a deliberate scope decision at launch — better to be reliable across one nation than thin across three. As of this update, that scope has grown: GeoScreen now covers Wales, with the same rule-governed rating engine, the same figure set, and the same discipline about
If you're buying land or bringing a site forward for development in England, flood risk is one of the first things a planning authority will look at — and one of the most common reasons a scheme runs into difficulty. Yet the flood zone system is widely misunderstood, and a surprising number of site appraisals
Magnum GSI
