QPlan · qplan.co.uk
QPlan: Planning Intelligence Platform
Pick or draw a site and see what it allows, what it needs and what could be built there, with every figure traced to a named source.
42
Official data sources per site
50
Council profiles
87,375
Appeal decisions indexed
11,610
Automated tests
The problem
Drafting a planning statement can take a senior planner two to four days, the quality varies from person to person, and relevant policies get missed. Before that, someone has to cross-reference constraints across dozens of government sources just to know whether a site is worth pursuing.
What it does
- A map with 3D views, land title outlines and a 500 m search area around any site.
- A constraints check against 35 planning.data.gov.uk datasets plus seven checks from the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Coal Authority, alongside Historic England, HM Land Registry and EPC data.
- Council pages and a policy library covering 50 local planning authorities and the current National Planning Policy Framework.
- A "how many fit" engine for site capacity, and development appraisals.
- Evidence from decided cases: 213,044 rows of official planning statistics across 328 authorities, and 87,375 appeal decisions across 360 authorities.
- A Scope Pack, with reports exported as PDF and Excel.
Built to be trusted
The core is deterministic. Figures come from code and data; the AI writes the prose around them and never authors a number. Where there is not enough evidence the answer is "insufficient data", and an unknown is reported as unknown, never as a no.
Nothing is cited unless the source was actually opened, and sources that did not contribute are dropped from the report. The residual land valuation was checked against a calculation done by hand and matched to the pound, and the figures quoted publicly are pinned by automated tests so they cannot drift.
Engineering
QPlan runs on Python and FastAPI with Postgres and PostGIS, hosted in London, with daily refreshes of legislation and census data. Anthropic Claude models handle chat and drafting; Mapbox, MapLibre and photorealistic 3D tiles drive the map. The test suite runs to 11,610 tests.
Where it stands
QPlan is in private beta with invited users while the public site takes a waitlist. Current work covers speed, drawing directly on the 3D map, and a "Do I need planning permission?" starting point.
Technology
- Python
- FastAPI
- Postgres + PostGIS
- Anthropic Claude
- Mapbox / MapLibre
- ReportLab PDF
- Excel export