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Bespoke Intelligence Reports

Planning intelligence.
Not planning advice.

We use software to extract, cross-reference and decode planning data that most people cannot access. You get an intelligence report — specific to your site, built by a software studio, delivered within 48 hours.

Request your report →
207
Councils covered
48hr
Preliminary overview
£249
Fixed fee
~£1,200
Consultant equivalent
What we do

The information exists.
Most people cannot reach it.

Local planning authority portals are designed to be searched by humans, not queried by machines. Committee meeting records, officer reports, comparable decisions — publicly available in theory. Getting to them requires custom tooling, persistence, and knowing exactly where to look. That is what we have built.

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Policy Layer Analysis

Every relevant LDP designation mapped to your site — decoded into plain English, not planning jargon.

🔍

Comparable Decisions Mining

We scrape committee records and planning registers to surface relevant approvals and refusals — including ones that never appear in standard search results.

⚠️

Refusal Pattern Analysis

Understanding why similar applications failed is often more valuable than knowing why they succeeded. We pull apart the wording.

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Ranked Strategy Options

2–3 ranked routes with an honest assessment of viability and what each one requires to succeed.

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Access Others Don't Have

We've built custom tooling that queries planning committee PDF archives and officer reports directly — bypassing the standard public portal that only surfaces a fraction of what's actually on record. Most planning agents use the same search you do.

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We Know What to Look For

Finding a comparable decision is useless if you can't read it. We decode officer report language, committee vote records and condition wording to tell you exactly what swung each decision — and what that means for your site.

Compare what you actually get

A planning consultant gives you an opinion formed from experience. We give you data extracted from the specific committee decisions that govern your site.

Traditional Planning Consultant

Opinion-based, generalist

  • 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

Data-driven, 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 looks like

Three 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 or planning agent.

🏔️
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
🏭
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
🏚️
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

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

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
Get started

Request your Site Intel Report

Tell us about your site. We review every enquiry personally and send a free preliminary overview within 48 hours.

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.