How Sevenoaks District Council analysed 28,000 consultation comments in a week 

Impact at a glance

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• 28,104 comments analysed from 5,017 representors

• 930 attached documents and handwritten letters streamlined

• 367 structured consultation reports

• Months of time saved by the planning policy team

• 5 days from data handover to reports with ConsultAI

• From pilot to scale  - helped shape ConsultAI before using it on their record-breaking Reg 18 consultation

 

The result: The full set of reports was ready ahead of a Committee meeting on 5th March 2026, enabling elected members to make decisions based on a complete, accurate analysis of every point raised.

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The Challenge: a consultation that grew beyond what manual analysis could handle

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Sevenoaks District Council was one of the local planning authorities that helped shape ConsultAI during its development, supported by the PropTech Innovation Fund Round 3. Working closely with The Future Fox during their first Regulation 18 consultation in 2024 where they received around 5,000 comments, Sevenoaks’ feedback directly influenced the final output structure and the balance between automation and human review that defines the tool today.

But this time, the scale was different. Changes to national planning policy - particularly around Green Belt release and significantly increased housing targets - meant that residents, developers, parish councils, and statutory bodies all had far more to say. The volume of responses reflected the depth of feeling in a district where Green Belt covers the majority of the land. With consultation volumes difficult to predict in advance, it was very difficult for the team to resource for this level of analysis internally.

The council received responses from 5,017 representors through multiple channels: an online consultation platform, email submissions, uploaded documents, and over 200 handwritten letters. Because ConsultAI works with any data source - not just a single consultation platform - all of these inputs could be processed together. Taken together, this amounted to:

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• Online comments: 21,087 across 19 spreadsheets

• Documents: 738 files - 9,929 pages of text

• Handwritten letters: 207 letters - 860 pages

• Total for analysis: 28,104 comments - 28.8 million characters

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28.8 million characters is roughly five times the complete works of Shakespeare. A single officer reading this material at a steady pace would need months - before any analysis could begin. And the Committee needed answers in weeks, not months. No consultation of this scale had ever been processed using report automation like ConsultAI before.

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​Why Sevenoaks chose ConsultAI again
 

​Having helped shape ConsultAI’s approach to structured reporting and human review, Sevenoaks understood what ConsultAI could do - and what it expected from them. When the second Regulation 18 consultation generated responses at a scale that would have overwhelmed a manual process, they already had confidence in the methodology and the outputs.The first consultation had saved the team 6-8 weeks of officer time - and that was at a fifth of the scale.

Where most AI tools assist officers with discrete tasks like tagging or summarising individual responses, ConsultAI automates the full analysis pipeline end-to-end - from raw data through to structured, submission-ready reports. For a consultation of this scale, that distinction was critical, as it could save officers much more time.

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“Overall, we estimate that using ConsultAI has provided a considerable time-saving, which has made a difference in our already tight Local Plan timescale"

 

- Hannah Gooden, Planning Policy Team Leader, Sevenoaks District Council

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The Solution: How ConsultAI handled the analysis
 

The council shared the consultation data with The Future Fox one week before the target reporting date. The dataset was complex: 19 spreadsheets with varying structures, plus over 730 uploaded documents in a wide range of formats - PDFs, Word documents, images, scanned letters, presentations, and more - and between 1 and 330 pages each.

Precision through policy context
ConsultAI ingested the Local Plan document and the council’s website as source material, generating accurate policy, site, and question descriptions. This meant every report reflected the specific policies, sites and their details, under consultation.

Handwritten letter transcription
Over 200 handwritten responses arrived by post - 860 pages in total. These are often tricky to deal with as they take significant time to capture and categorise. ConsultAI’s transcription tool digitised the letters, converting handwriting into structured text that could be checked, reviewed for personal information redactions, and analysed alongside the digital submissions. 

Document, email and letter analysis
Instead of including the entire content of each document, email or letter by default, ConsultAI efficiently and accurately extracts the text relevant to the policy, site or question. This means that comments about an unrelated policy don’t accidentally get included in a report about a specific policy - mimicking officers’ routine practise of ‘chunking’ long documents by policy, site or question. 

Data preparation
The data from the online platform had some issues common to Local Plan questionnaires and can create a headache in the analysis stage, especially if they're missed. Using ConsultAI’s AI-assisted data tools, these could be dealt with quickly. The five-day window included checkpoints with the customer to confirm data accuracy and resolve queries on issues like:

• Free text fields to capture policy, site or evidence base document references. This inevitably leads to multiple variants of the names of each policy, site or document - which creates noise if not handled. ConsultAI detects these variants and with rapid human review by officers, can correct them so there is one distinct reference each.

• Missing data. When dealing with large volumes of data with unknown counts it is easy to miss out including some data for the final analysis. But this can have severe consequences as councils must consider every response received. ConsultAI’s intake validation means it’s easy to confirm any missing data against the expected intake, and missing documents were spotted and able to be included. 

• Varying questionnaire and data structures. For example for policy questions with multiple parts per question, these answers needed to be restructured to create 1 report for the policy, rather than separate reports.

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After restructuring, the 28,104 raw comments were consolidated to 21,211 unique comments, ready for report generation by policy, site and evidence base document. That’s in addition to the quantitative data of a similar volume, which was being analysed separately.

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Generating 367 reports
Using ConsultAI’s batch processing service, the data was uploaded, the report settings configured, and 367 structured reports were generated. Each report provided:

• A clear overview of the key themes and positions taken by respondents

• A detailed thematic breakdown of the issues raised

• Separate analysis for organisations and individuals - so officers could see how professional bodies and residents differed in their views

 

The reports ran concurrently and took between 2 minutes and 1h 40minutes; the largest single report covered nearly 4,000 comments. Every report was delivered as an editable Word document, structured, searchable, and consistent, and Sevenoaks’ officers reviewed the outputs against their review of the original representations. 

 

“We cross-checked the outputs to ensure accuracy and have been impressed with the quality of the policy and site summaries."

 

- Hannah Gooden, Planning Policy Team Leader, Sevenoaks District Council

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The officers then compiled the final report using the ConsultAI summaries alongside statistical information, and individual stakeholder summaries, published on 19th February 2026, ahead of the Committee meeting - and just 8 weeks after the close of the consultation.​

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“AI didn't replace the planner, it empowered us to do our jobs better."

 

- Emma Coffin, Senior Planning Officer, Sevenoaks District Council

 

The result: Reporting to Committee within 8 weeks - and moving swiftly on to Reg 19

 

On 5 March 2026 Sevenoaks’ Development & Infrastructure Advisory Committee met to consider the consultation findings. Elected members could see exactly what residents and organisations had said about each policy, each site allocation, and each aspect of the plan.

Without ConsultAI, producing this depth of analysis from 28,000+ comments would have required months of the whole team's time, delaying the Committee decision and pushing back the overall Local Plan timetable. Instead, with the Regulation 18 analysis complete and on time, Sevenoaks can now move straight into preparing their Regulation 19 consultation this summer - and remain on track to submit their Local Plan for Examination by the end of the year.

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“We were able to turn around the consultation from close to Committee meeting in 8 working weeks, which will allow us to progress to Regulation 19 without delay."

 

- Hannah Gooden, Planning Policy Team Leader, Sevenoaks District Council

 

Ready to find out what ConsultAI do for your team?
 

📩 Schedule your demo today: hello@thefuturefox.com
 

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