Built so you don’t have to take our word for anything
Planning Policy exists to fill a specific gap: between free council advice that is too general to act on, and a £1,500+ planning consultant for questions that official data can answer in minutes. The product is a screening report for your exact address — and a methodology designed so every claim can be checked by you.
Four operating principles
Extractive, never generative
Software assembles your report and AI helps explain it — but no policy quote is ever written by AI. Every quote is a string copied from the stored official document.
Verify before render
Before a report is allowed to generate, every quote is checked character-for-character against its source by deterministic software — not AI. A quote that fails the check is replaced with a verified extract, and the failure is logged.
Say what we didn’t find
Councils publish data at different rates. Every report states exactly which datasets were checked and what was and wasn’t found — we never infer a restriction, or the absence of one, from a gap.
A screening tool, not legal advice
Reports tell you where you stand before you spend money — they do not replace your council’s decision or professional representation for complex cases, and every report says so.
Sources, in full
| What | Source | How we hold it |
|---|---|---|
| Designations on your property | planning.data.gov.uk — the national planning data index | Read live at generation time |
| National policy (NPPF) | gov.uk — Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government | Ingested verbatim, version-hashed |
| Permitted development guidance | gov.uk — MHCLG technical guidance | Ingested verbatim, version-hashed |
| Strategic policy (London) | london.gov.uk — The London Plan 2021 | Ingested verbatim, version-hashed |
| Local policy | Your council’s adopted Local Plan | Ingested on demand, cached, verified |
| Nearby decisions | Council planning registers (via planit.org.uk) | Read live; every case links to the council record |
| Geocoding | postcodes.io — Ordnance Survey / ONS open data | Read live |
All sources are official and published under the Open Government Licence. Our NPPF corpus is fingerprinted (e9f8cd382a7c…) so any change to the source document is detected and re-ingested — the same versioning applies to the London Plan and PD guidance. Browse everything we hold in the policy library.
What AI does here, and what it is not allowed to do
We use AI (Anthropic’s Claude models) for two jobs: reading your one-line project description, and writing the plain-English explanations between the evidence. It is not allowed to author quotes, invent designations, or fill data gaps — the verification gate is deterministic code precisely so that the part of the system that guarantees accuracy cannot hallucinate. Where AI is unavailable, reports still generate from templates; they read plainer, and every fact holds.
Talk to us
Questions, corrections, or something in a report that doesn’t look right: hello@planningpolicy.co.uk. If we got something wrong we want to know — the audit trail means we can trace any claim in any report back to its source.