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Is your land worth pursuing?
Find out before you spend anything.

Most people spend £500–£1,500 on a planning consultant before they know whether a route even exists. We dig first. Tell us your site and we'll send you a free preliminary overview within 48 hours — so you can decide if it's worth going further. If it is, the full report is £249 fixed.

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207
Councils covered
48hr
Preliminary overview
£249
Fixed fee
~£1,200
Typical pre-app cost
Why Planning Decoder is different

A software studio built this.
Not a planning office.

A planning consultant is limited by billable hours and what they know to look for. We built custom tooling that queries planning systems at a depth and speed a human researcher cannot match — and we charge a fixed price, so we go as deep as the case warrants.

48 Hours. Not 3 Weeks.

A planning agent doing this properly takes 2–3 weeks. We do it in 48 hours because the research runs in parallel — policy layer, register search, committee archives, Land Registry and comparable decisions simultaneously, not sequentially.

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We Go Where Portals Can't

The standard planning portal surfaces a fraction of what's on record. We built tooling that extracts directly from committee PDF archives, officer reports and meeting minutes — decisions that have never appeared in a public search result. That's where the real precedent lives.

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Six Sources. One Report.

Planning register. Companies House. Land Registry. Historic OS mapping via Cynefin. Satellite imagery. AONB and designation layers. A human researcher does these one at a time over days. We run them together.

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Fixed Price. No Billing Clock.

A planning consultant's research depth is constrained by what you'll pay per hour. Ours isn't. £249 fixed means we go as deep as your case warrants — not as deep as the invoice allows.

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Decisions, Not Summaries

We pull comparable decisions in full — officer report wording, committee vote records, conditions imposed, the arguments that worked and the ones that didn't. You get the actual precedent, not a paraphrase of it.

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Built by Sierra21 Software Studio

Planning Decoder is built and operated by Sierra21 — a software studio that builds AI-powered products for real problems. We apply the same technical depth to planning intelligence that we apply to everything we build. No off-the-shelf tools. No standard searches. Custom infrastructure, built for this.

Before the consultant.
Not instead of one.

A planning consultant charges £500–£2,000 for a pre-application review that takes weeks and uses the same public portals you can access yourself. We go deeper, faster, and at a fixed price — because we built the tools to do it.

Planning Consultant (pre-application)

Experience-based, opinion-led

  • Hourly billing — no ceiling on cost
  • General policy knowledge, not site-specific data
  • Won't show comparable decisions — take their word for it
  • 2–3 week turnaround typical
  • £500–£2,000 for a pre-application review
  • Doesn't include officer report wording or vote records
£500–£2ktypical entry cost, no written deliverable
Planning Decoder — Site Intel Report

Evidence-based, site-specific

  • Fixed fee — you know the cost before you commit
  • Committee decisions specific to your LPA, designation, site type
  • Every comparable shown — application number, date, officer wording
  • Preliminary overview within 48 hours
  • £249 fixed — full written report delivered
  • Refusal pattern analysis — what killed the refused ones
£249fixed · full written report
Case studies

What a Site Intel Report
actually does

Four real enquiry types. Details anonymised. This is the depth of intelligence you receive — presented as a working document you can take directly to an architect, planning agent, or prospective buyer.

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Rural Land · AONB · North Wales
Smallholding in Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty — is a new dwelling possible?
4 acres · open countryside · designated AONB

The client owned a 4-acre rural parcel in a designated AONB and wanted to understand whether any route existed to place a permanent dwelling on the land. Standard advice had been uniformly negative. We were asked to look harder.

What our intel pull found
Three viable policy routes identified under the Welsh Government TAN 6 / One Planet Development framework — including a pathway not mentioned in any standard guidance for this area
Unanimous approval (16–0 committee vote) found in the same AONB — surfaced via custom committee PDF extraction, not the standard planning portal
Holiday accommodation approval within the identical AONB designation and same LPA — complete with officer report wording and the conditions that made it acceptable
One comparable refusal analysed — the exact wording that killed it, and why the same wording would not apply here
✓ Clear strategy and three comparable decisions to take to an architect
Saved est. £800–£1,400 vs consultant pre-app
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Commercial · Agricultural Conversion · Cambridgeshire
Redundant agricultural building — conversion to commercial workspace. Viable or not?
380m² steel-frame building · no mains utilities · agricultural classification

The client had acquired a former grain store and wanted to convert it into five commercial workspace units. Two planning agents had given conflicting advice. They needed clarity before spending money on drawings.

What our intel pull found
Class R Permitted Development rights confirmed applicable — prior approval route identified, no full planning application required
Four comparable prior approval decisions found in the same LPA within 24 months — including one for a near-identical building type at 340m²
One prior approval refusal analysed — failed on highway access grounds — confirmed the client's building did not share this constraint
Bat survey and utility connection obligations flagged from comparable conditions — forewarned, not surprised on site
✓ Proceeded via prior approval — no full planning application, saving 6+ months
Saved est. £1,200 in feasibility costs
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Residential Conversion · No Road Access · Somerset
Isolated barn, no formal access, prior refusal on record — written off too soon?
Stone barn · no adopted road within 400m · flood zone 2 · 2019 refusal

A 2019 refusal existed on record. Their solicitor advised walking away. They asked us to look at whether that refusal was truly final — or whether someone had just applied it badly.

What our intel pull found
2019 refusal fully decoded — failed on two grounds: highway safety (no formal access) and flood risk (inadequate sequential test)
Both grounds addressable — comparable approval found 9 miles away navigating identical access constraints via private access agreement and swept-path analysis
Flood risk ground found to be a methodology failure, not a site failure — correct sequential test approach identified from a successful appeal in the same LPA
Full refusal decoded into an architect brief — exactly what went wrong and how to fix it
✓ Dead end converted into a viable application with a clear brief
Saved est. £900–£1,500 in solicitor advice
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Land Sale · AONB · North Wales
Not planning to develop — but thinking about selling. Does the intel report still make sense?
Registered title · former industrial land · restrictive covenant on title

The client owned a small registered parcel of land — former industrial use, adjacent to a residential property they had previously sold — in a designated AONB. Health constraints meant development was not realistic for them personally. But they wondered whether the land had untapped value, and whether anything could be done before they simply sold it.

What our intel pull found
Full title history pulled — restrictive covenant identified, dated and assessed. Not a blanket block: time-limited and likely dischargeable by a motivated buyer.
Live operating holiday let identified 300 metres from the plot — same AONB designation, same open countryside policy — actively trading and rated. A buyer can see a working comparable before they spend a penny.
Flintshire planning committee approval for glamping in identical open countryside AONB surfaced from committee PDF archives — gives any buyer a direct policy precedent to open negotiations with the LPA.
Earth-sheltered design identified as the strongest planning angle for the topography — sinking a structure into the landform removes the primary AONB objection before it can be raised.
✓ A £249 report attached to the title — handed to the buyer as a documented planning route
Land value uplift estimated at several multiples of the report cost

The report doesn't give you planning permission. What it gives you is documented evidence that a credible route exists — and the comparable decisions to back it up. Most buyers of awkward plots won't know where to start. You'd be handing them the roadmap. That's worth real money to the right person.

Simple, fixed fees.
No hourly billing. No surprises.

You know the cost before you commit. Every report is produced by Sierra21 Software Studio using custom tooling built to extract planning intelligence that standard portals cannot surface.

Site Intelligence Report

The full decode — policy layer, comparable decisions, strategy options and what to avoid. A professional written report you can take directly to an architect or planning agent.

£249· fixed fee · all in
  • Full policy layer analysis — every relevant LDP designation mapped to your site
  • Comparable decisions mining — approvals and refusals from committee records, not just the standard portal
  • Refusal pattern analysis — what killed similar applications and why it matters for yours
  • 2–3 ranked strategy options with honest viability assessments
  • Key contacts — who to approach, in what order, what to say
  • Delivered as a professional PDF report
⚡ Preliminary overview within 48 hours of enquiry
Pay £249 — start my report →

Secure payment via Stripe · Full report delivered within 48 hours

Add-ons

Bolt on to any Site Intelligence Report for deeper work on specific aspects.

  • Pre-Application Script
    Exactly what to say — and not say — in your pre-app meeting to get the most useful response from the planning officer.
    + £75
  • Refusal Deep Dive
    Previous refusal on site or nearby? We pull it apart ground by ground and identify what is and is not fixable.
    + £75
  • Full Bundle
    Report + Pre-App Script + Refusal Deep Dive. Everything.
    £349 all in
Start here — it's free

Tell us about your site.
We'll dig for 48 hours.

No payment at this stage. We review every enquiry personally and send a free preliminary overview within 48 hours. You decide if the full report is worth it.

How this works right nowNo payment at this stage. Submit the form and we'll send you a free 2–3 page preliminary overview within 48 hours. If you want the full £249 report, you decide then. No obligation.
Postcode of the land or property you're asking about.
Max 400 characters. We'll ask follow-up questions if needed.

Site Intelligence Reports are produced by Sierra21 Software Studio — the team behind Planning Decoder. We build custom data extraction tooling that queries planning systems at a level most people cannot access.