Planning and consultancy
Planning consultants and multi-disciplinary practices, where the advice is chargeable but assembling the evidence behind it isn't.
Where it breaks
A small sample of the problems we hear most often in planning and consultancy. Not a complete list, and not all of them will be yours.
- 01
The constraints check is an afternoon of tabs
Local plan, Article 4 directions, conservation area, flood zone, TPOs, listed buildings, highways. There are over three hundred planning authorities in England and each holds the same information its own way, a good deal of it as scanned documents and archived maps rather than data.
- 02
Precedent lives in the practice, not in a system
Somebody remembers a similar appeal decision. Finding it means asking three colleagues or searching a council portal by hand.
- 03
Objections arriving faster than anyone can read them
Producing a long, technical-looking objection now costs an objector nothing, and the duty to engage with each one has not changed. A single scheme attracts volumes that would have been unthinkable two years ago, most of it templated, and somebody still has to read all of it, group it and answer it. The officer's report runs forty pages on top.
- 04
Statements written against policy that moved
A design and access statement starts as last month's with the site-specific parts swapped out. The NPPF was rewritten this month, biodiversity net gain exemptions changed the month before, and applications submitted before the change run under the old rules. Two regimes, side by side, and precedent documents that get corrected when a case officer points out they're wrong.
- 05
Applications refused validation on avoidable things
Every authority publishes its own validation list and they differ. A pack comes back for a missing ownership certificate, the wrong fee, plans at the wrong scale or a missing CIL form. None of that is planning judgement, and all of it was checkable against a published document before the pack went anywhere.
- 06
Deadlines that don't forgive
Eight weeks for a minor, thirteen for a major, sixteen where an environmental statement applies, and most applications don't finish inside it. Then every extension of time and performance agreement has its own renegotiated date, running in parallel across every live application, in a spreadsheet somebody has to remember to open.
What we'd build
A small sample of the kind of thing we build. What we'd actually scope depends on which of the problems above is costing you most.
A constraints report from a postcode
Allocation, Article 4, designations, flood zone, TPOs and planning history pulled and assembled for a site, with every source cited, before you have opened a tab.
An afternoon of tabs turned into minutes, on work nobody was paying you for.
Precedent you can search
Appeal decisions, committee reports and the practice's own past applications turned into something you can query by policy, use class or reason for refusal.
Stronger arguments found in minutes, without asking three colleagues what they remember.
The long documents read for you
Officer reports and decision notices reduced to the points that change your advice, with the paragraph cited. Objections grouped by material planning ground, the templated bulk separated from the genuinely distinct points, and anything raising a ground you haven't addressed flagged.
Objection responses in a fraction of the time, with nothing material left unanswered.
The pack checked against that authority's list
A submission checked against the specific council's published validation list before it goes in: missing documents, wrong fee, wrong certificate, plans at the wrong scale. Validation stops being a thing you find out about a fortnight later.
Fewer invalid submissions, and a fortnight not lost to re-validation.
Every statutory date watched
Determination, consultation, appeal and discharge dates held against each application, along with every agreed extension, with the ones approaching surfaced without anyone opening a file.
No determination, appeal or discharge date missed across a live caseload.
Recognise any of these?
Thirty minutes with a founder. Walk us through the problems your team lives with and we'll talk about whether any of it has to stay that way.