Privacy Policy

Who we are

PlanningLedger is a trading name of Alpha Maven Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 09070132, with its registered office at Unit 302, The Finsbury Business Centre, 40 Bowling Green Lane, London EC1R 0NE. Alpha Maven Ltd operates planningledger.com, a planning intelligence service for UK property, and is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. For anything in this policy, contact us at [email protected].

When you use the free constraint check

Address searches are processed to generate your results; the addresses you search are property locations, not linked to your identity. We do not store raw IP addresses — rate limiting uses a one-way hash that cannot be reversed to identify you. We run no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics.

When you buy a report or save a snapshot

We store your email address only when you explicitly provide it — to deliver your report, keep your purchase history in your portal, and sign you in via magic link. Payments are handled by Stripe; your card details go directly to Stripe and never touch our servers. Marketing emails require a separate, optional consent, and you can withdraw it at any time.

Cookies

We set one essential cookie: a session cookie when you sign in. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

We count visits to our public pages with an analytics tool we host ourselves (umami). It sets no cookie and stores no IP address. It records the page visited (never the part of an address after the question mark), the full referring address, the browser, the type of device and the country, and on Reading Room pages it counts presses of the ask and verdict buttons. On the Reading Room it is never loaded on a page whose address carries a sign-in or answer link, or an invite code.

Third-party services

Map images on snapshot and report pages are loaded from third-party map tile servers (OpenStreetMap) — those servers see your IP address when the page loads, as with any website resource. The map library itself is served from our own servers, not a third-party CDN. Payment pages are served by Stripe. We do not send your personal data to any other third party.

Planning application data

Our planning intelligence is built from statutory public records — planning applications, decisions, and adopted policy documents published by local planning authorities under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. These registers are published for public inspection by the authority, which applies its own redaction before publishing. We process this data under the legitimate-interests basis (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) for planning transparency and property research.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to access, correct, or erase personal data we hold about you, to object to our processing, and to data portability. Email [email protected] and we will respond within one month. If you are unhappy with our response, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Retention

Purchase records are kept as long as needed for your portal and our legal obligations. Your email is deleted on request. Planning application data is retained as a research record of public planning history.

When you ask the Reading Room a question

The Reading Room is a free limited-release trial. We keep your email address, the question you type and the answers we produce, plus anything you choose to tell us (your organisation, role, what you are researching, how you heard of us, and whether we may contact you about a call), your ratings, a record of which of our sources each answer drew on, which page of our site you first asked from, and whether your question was one of our example questions left unedited. You give consent on the question form, and you can withdraw it at any time by asking us to delete your records.

We start on your question straight away, before we know the email address is yours. The first email to that address says an answer is ready and does not repeat anything that was typed. The answer opens only after the button in that email is pressed. If it isn’t pressed within 30 days, we delete the question, the answer and the address.

Questions often describe live projects. They are never published or sold. Only PlanningLedger, people working for us under a confidentiality agreement, and the services that produce the answer see them; any statistics we share are counts of groups of five or more. Answers are produced by Anthropic’s Claude models, which process the question in the United States under Anthropic’s data processing terms, which include the UK safeguards for such transfers; Anthropic may not train its models on what we send. The model reaches our records only through our own systems in Helsinki, Finland. Email is sent through SMTP2GO’s EU service.

To learn how the Reading Room is used, we sort each question by topic and purpose from a fixed list, partly automatically; no decision about you is made from it. After an answer we may ask up to two optional questions about how you used it, and if you tick the box we send one email a week later to ask how it went, and nothing else. If you tell us your organisation, we may match it, at firm level only, to the professional register we publish, to understand which kinds of firm use the Reading Room. We never copy your question into our software or test sets; any example we show anyone else is rewritten, and needs your permission if it could identify you or your project. If you name a site your question is about, we keep it with your question, with the role you gave us. Reading Room pages count visits with the cookie-free analytics tool described under Cookies. The Reading Room’s area may grow to named councils around London; this page will say which.

If we talk to you: we call only people who ask for a call, or who tell us we may. Your feedback matters to us: we use it to improve our products and services. For that purpose a call may be recorded. We tell you at the start if it is, and you can ask us not to. The recording is used only to make notes of your feedback automatically, by our own systems and the AI service named above, on the same terms as answers. We note only what is relevant to improving our products and services. The recording, and any transcript of it, is deleted as soon as the notes are made, and within 30 days at most. Only PlanningLedger and people working for us under a confidentiality agreement see the notes.

We keep questions, answers, ratings and call notes while the Reading Room runs, and delete the detailed record of sources after 90 days. Ask and we delete everything of yours within 30 days, including our notes of any call. After a deletion we keep only what each answer cost (the model, the price and the time) and an anonymous record of any call, with nothing that identifies you.

If you're a planning professional

We hold limited business information about firms that act professionally in the planning system, drawn from the public planning register and Companies House. If we've contacted your firm — or you'd like to know what we hold and how to opt out permanently — see how we hold information about planning professionals.