Town Planner Pro and artificial intelligence

1. A tool, not an adviser

Town Planner Pro is a research tool for planning professionals. It gathers official information about a site, the development plan, national policy and the appeal record, and puts it in front of the professional who is using it.

It does not give planning advice. It does not form planning judgements, weigh considerations, predict the outcome of an application or appeal, or recommend a course of action. Every judgement is made by the professional, who is responsible for anything they advise, write or submit.

2. Where AI is used, and where it is not

Much of Town Planner Pro uses no AI at all.

No AI:

• Constraint checks. Your red line is checked directly against the official datasets (Historic England, Natural England, the Environment Agency, planning.data.gov.uk, the Greater London Authority, the Department for Transport and others), and each result names its source.
• Maps, keys and the site appraisal report. The report is assembled from those results; it is not written by AI.
• Policy text. The National Planning Policy Framework and the London Plan are shown as published, linked to the official versions.
• The appeal record. Each decision, and the Inspector’s letter wherever one was published, is the Planning Inspectorate’s own record.

AI is used for:

• Reading appeal decision letters. We use AI to pick out the main issues, the policies and judgments cited, and what decided each appeal. This is labelled as our reading of the letter, never as the Inspector’s words, and the letter is always there to read.
• Search by meaning. AI ranks decision letters by how closely their reasoning matches the question you type. The results are the letters themselves.
• Reading your documents. When you add a decision notice, officer report or similar document, AI reads it to fill in case details. You check every field before it is saved, and a field the document does not state is left empty rather than guessed.
• Planning history. AI reads council register pages to list previous applications for a site.
• Casework updates and the deadline briefing. AI drafts short summaries from the dates and details already in your account.
• Topic briefings. Where a planning topic is in the news, AI writes up the figures from the appeal record; the topic and the figures are chosen by the system, not by the AI.

3. How the AI is kept to its job

• It is limited to UK planning and to the information in your account, and declines anything else.
• It describes and summarises. It is not asked to advise, recommend or predict, and it does not estimate anyone’s chances of success.
• Where it reads a document, it is told to leave a field empty rather than guess.
• Its output is linked to, or shown beside, the source it came from, so it can be checked.
• Licensed Ordnance Survey plans are never passed to any AI feature.

4. Your information

Included AI: your request passes through our servers to our AI provider (currently Anthropic) and the reply comes back the same way. We record how much was used, for billing and fair use, not what was asked.

Your own key: your request goes from your browser straight to the provider you chose (Anthropic, OpenAI or Google), under your own agreement with them. It does not pass through our servers.

When you search the appeal record by meaning, the words you type are sent to Voyage AI to be turned into a search vector; nothing else about you is sent. The full list of the services we use is at townplannerpro.co.uk/sub-processors.

Before adding personal or sensitive information to any document you use with AI, check it against your own data protection obligations.

5. Your professional responsibility

Anything produced with Town Planner Pro is research material for the professional to check, not a finished opinion. Check each result against its source before relying on it, apply your own judgement, and follow the code of conduct of your professional body. The Royal Town Planning Institute’s practice advice says AI should support, not replace, a planner’s professional judgement; Town Planner Pro is built on that basis.

6. Declaring AI use to the Planning Inspectorate

The Planning Inspectorate’s guidance, Use of artificial intelligence in casework evidence, asks parties to declare when AI has been used to draft or substantially rewrite text, or to produce a summary or analysis, in appeals, applications and examinations. The declaration says what AI was used for and in which parts, the checks made, and that the author takes responsibility for accuracy.

The constraint checks, maps and appraisal report listed under “No AI” above are not AI-generated. The features listed under “AI is used for” are, and should be declared where they shaped what you submit.

Suggested wording, to adapt to what you actually did:

In preparing [this statement / these appendices], I used Town Planner Pro, a planning research tool. Its constraint checks and maps are drawn directly from official datasets and are not AI-generated. I used its AI features to [search appeal decisions by meaning / read summaries of appeal decision letters / extract details from the decision notice], which informed [paragraphs X to Y]. I checked each decision and quotation against the original letter on the Planning Inspectorate’s website. AI was not used to form any planning judgement. The planning judgements in this [statement] are my own and I take responsibility for its accuracy.

7. Contact

Questions about this statement: hello@townplannerpro.co.uk

This statement describes how Town Planner Pro works at the date above. It is not legal advice, and it sits alongside our Terms of Use and Privacy Notice, which govern the service.