Planning
Planning answers from the policy itself.
PlanningAssist is in beta; PlanningConsult is in development.
Planning Handbook publishes planning guidance. These two tools answer from the local plan and national policy, and show their sources.
How the answers stay honest.
Every answer starts from the policy itself. Anything we publish is checked again, claim by claim.
How every answer is found
We read the rulebook first.
Local plans, national policy and official guidance are broken into short passages, each tagged with where it came from.
347 of 361 planning authorities (96%).
We file it by meaning.
Each passage is indexed by what it means, not only the words it uses, so a question finds the right policy even when it’s phrased differently. Exact keyword search runs alongside.
We answer only from what we find.
Answers are written from the passages we retrieve, and every point cites its source. If nothing matches well enough, it says so instead of guessing.
PlanningAssist and PlanningConsult answer this way.
How published guidance is checked
PlanningContent adds two more steps before anything is published.
We check every claim.
Before anything is published, the text is split into individual claims and each one is checked against the policy: verified, outdated, unsupported, uncertain or not covered. A second, independent check reviews the result.
A second, independent check reviews the result.
A person signs it off.
An editor sees every verdict and citation, and nothing is published until they approve it.
Nothing is published until an editor approves it.
PlanningContent
PlanningContent writes and refreshes the Planning Handbook’s guidance in our house style, with versions for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Every factual claim is checked against the policy, and nothing is exported until an editor has approved it.
Used by Freestart’s own editors.
Where the method is used
PlanningAssist and PlanningConsult answer the way every answer is found: only from the passages they retrieve, with a source for every point.
PlanningAssist
Ask a planning question, get a plain-English answer with its sources.
Read about PlanningAssist →PlanningConsult
A postcode check against planning constraints, and a drafted planning statement.
Read about PlanningConsult →- ReadPlanning Handbook ↗Guidance
- AskPlanningAssistBeta
- CheckPlanningConsultIn development
Read the guidance, ask PlanningAssist, then check the site.
Beyond planning
The same method works on any rulebook.
Nothing in the method is specific to planning. Read the source documents, index them by meaning, answer only with citations, check every claim, and keep a person in charge of what gets published. It’s designed to apply to HR policy, health and safety and other compliance work, wherever getting a rule wrong matters. Each new rulebook needs its own sources and tests, and we build those with you.
An approach we can apply with you, built and tested for each new rulebook.