The problem
A residential planning application can touch fifty or more pieces of policy — a council's adopted Local Plan, its emerging draft, half a dozen SPDs, an Article 4 direction, a neighbourhood plan, conservation area appraisals and recent appeal decisions on near-identical schemes. Most of it is buried in PDFs. Most of it doesn't apply. Working out the few clauses that do apply to a specific address is the slowest, most error-prone part of any consultant's day.
What we built
Ellis now ingests every adopted Local Plan in England, alongside its SPDs, Article 4 directions, conservation area maps and a rolling index of Planning Inspectorate decisions. Drop in an address and a short description of the project, and Ellis returns a structured policy brief: the clauses that apply, the clauses worth flagging, and the precedent the case officer is most likely to reach for.
"It used to take me a morning to write the policy section of a planning statement. Ellis gives me a defensible draft before I've finished my coffee."
How it works
- 1. Locate. Ellis resolves the address to a local planning authority, ward, conservation area and any active Article 4 direction.
- 2. Retrieve. He pulls the relevant clauses from the adopted Local Plan, draft Local Plan, SPDs and neighbourhood plan.
- 3. Cross-reference. Each clause is matched against recent appeal decisions for similar schemes in the same authority.
- 4. Brief. You get a one-page summary, a clause-by-clause table and citations back to the original source.
What's next
Welsh and Scottish authorities are next on the roadmap, alongside automatic monitoring of policy changes so Ellis can flag the moment a clause you've cited gets superseded. If you'd like early access, ask Ellis to start a project below.