Planning consultancy · England
We advise on planning.
Advice for anyone with a planning question. We read the record first, then build the case the record will actually carry.
Terrain: Environment Agency LIDAR, 1m DTM, east of Swindon · OGL v3
Analysis / Planning / Implementation
Most planning advice is an opinion with a letterhead. Ours starts with the record.
The record is the policy as adopted, the constraints on the ground, and every decision the authority has already made on sites like yours. We read that before we form a view, because an argument the record will not carry does not survive its first competent reader.
Then comes the part evidence cannot do on its own. A decision turns on how the case is put: which facts carry weight with this authority, in what order, and what the other side will say when it sees them. Evidence is the science. The case built on it is the craft, and it is the half that changes outcomes.
It is the same work whoever is asking. A question about one field and a question about a thousand homes come out of the same evidence.
What we do
Strategic planning
Taking a site, a policy position or an allocation and working out what is achievable, in what order, and what it will take to get there. Then the route, and the argument that carries each step of it.
Landowners, developers, authorities
Research and analysis
Our own record of what the planning system decides, read against the wider economy. Research is collecting what happened. Analysis is knowing which parts of it matter to you.
Anyone making a decision that has to hold
Land promotion
Moving land through the system so it is worth what it should be worth, and so it holds up when somebody examines it.
Landowners and their agents
Project management
Running the process. Programme, consultants, submissions and the authority relationship, held together so the thing lands.
Anyone without the bandwidth to run it themselves
Who we work with
The planning system treats these people very differently. We do not. The same evidence answers all of their questions. It just gets pointed in different directions.
Parish and town councils
Reading a local plan, responding to a consultation, or working out whether an application is as harmless as it looks. Plain answers, and an honest view of what objecting will and will not achieve.
Local authorities
Evidence base work, policy testing and a second opinion from people who spend their time on the other side of the table. We tell you where a position is weak before an inspector does.
Landowners
What your land is, what it could be, and what stands between the two. Promotion where it suits the site, advice where it does not.
Developers and housebuilders
Site appraisal, allocation strategy, applications and appeals. Where the risk sits in a programme, and what it would cost to remove it.
Promoters and investors
Diligence on land and on planning positions, read against how the market and the policy backdrop are moving rather than how a brochure says they are.
Other consultants
Research, analysis and specialist input for teams who need a planning read they can put their name to.
Research
All researchWe publish what we find. Partly because it is the only honest way to claim an edge in research, and partly because most of these questions get asked of us more than once.
September 2026 · Market
Permission is not the constraint any more
Policy is opening land up across the country. Costs have moved faster, and the binding constraint has quietly changed from consent to money.
September 2026 · Green Belt
Grey belt is not a green light
The appeal record so far says the label matters much less than the location test sitting behind it.
September 2026 · Policy
Eight hundred metres from a station is now a planning policy
The revised framework put figures against proximity to a station: 800 metres, 35 dwellings a hectare, 45 where the service is better.
Experience
New Eastern Villages, Swindon
One of the largest urban extensions in the country. Our team worked on and delivered the planning application. Great Stall East, its first phase, has outline consent.
Existing site, and the consented scheme
Scroll
Tell us the question. We will tell you what we would need to answer it.
No charge for the first conversation, and no obligation after it. If we are not the right people we will say so.