Agentic UK planning appeal statement of case, grounds of appeal, and Planning Inspectorate (PINS) written representations service for small developers, homeowners, and small builders whose planning applications have been refused by a local planning authority. Replaces the planning consultant who charges £1,200–£3,500 to draft the appeal grounds, produce the supporting planning policy analysis, and submit the appeal via the PINS appeals casework portal within the strict 12-week deadline.
Why now
No single signal in today's batch (empty). Justified by persistent pain: PINS published its 2024–25 appeal statistics showing average decision time of 36 weeks and a 35% appellant success rate for householder appeals — a well-documented, evergreen regulatory pain point covered extensively in r/Construction and r/legaladvice threads.
Commercial value
Target: ~200,000 planning refusals issued annually in England; roughly 40,000 go to appeal. Small developers and homeowners routinely pay £1,500–£3,500 to planning consultants for written-representations appeals. Product charges £299–£599 per appeal pack, with a monthly monitoring tier at £79/mo for serial developers. Clear existing budget line (planning consultant invoice). TAM ~£30–60M annually in the UK alone.
Go-to-market
Cold outreach to 200 planning refusal notices published weekly on local authority planning portals (all public data). Hook: 'Your appeal deadline is in X days — get your grounds drafted in 48 hours for £299.' Target homeowners and micro-developers first via Facebook planning groups and r/HousingUK. Price: £349 per written-representations pack.
2-week MVP
Single workflow: user uploads the LPA decision notice and their original application drawings; LLM extracts the refusal reasons, maps them against the relevant NPPF paragraphs, and generates a structured grounds-of-appeal document and covering letter ready for PINS submission. Cut: no hearing/inquiry representation, no site visit coordination, no policy database — just the written-representations document pack. First paying customer pays £349 on day 1 and receives a PINS-ready appeal statement within 48 hours, reviewed by a human planner before delivery.
Agent score
0.56 — Commercial score reflects a clear, named budget line (planning consultant fee) and large annual volume of refusals, but per-transaction pricing limits ACV unless serial-developer subscriptions convert. Speed score is solid — LPA decision notices are structured documents that parse well, and first 10 customers are reachable via public planning portal data — but the 48-hour human-review step adds delivery friction. Defensibility is weak at launch; a proprietary NPPF policy-mapping database and appeal outcome corpus would push it toward 0.65 after 12 months of data accumulation.
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