AI consultation analysis: Sevenoaks District Council Regulation 18 Local Plan

Update 26th February 2026: Since publishing this case study, we've completed a subsequent consultation for Sevenoaks District Council — analysing over 28,000 comments and 10,000 pages of documents to create 367 site and policy reports in record time. The workflow below still applies, but at a scale that demonstrates ConsultAI's ability to handle the most demanding statutory consultations. Read the latest case study here.

Challenges

The consultation received over 5,500 responses, many of which contained comments on multiple sites and policies. Faced with weeks of costly manual analysis, the Council sought an AI solution to efficiently analyse the responses and save both time and money.

Solutions

After successfully piloting The Future Fox AI solution earlier in the year, the Council decided to commission The Future Fox to analyse their Local Plan consultation data.

The Future Fox used cutting-edge AI technologies to produce a coded analysis for each of the 54 sites, producing easy-to-use tables of topics and the number of comments per topic. The whole service took only 3 days, including a manual quality review by The Future Fox team.

“Through this work, Sevenoaks District Council not only achieved significant time and cost savings but also demonstrated the potential of AI to revolutionise stakeholder engagement. It is a glimpse into the future of public engagement”

Hannah Gooden,

Planning Policy Team Leader,

Sevenoaks District Council

Results

The solution was 60 times faster than the Council’s workflow of manually categorising comments, summarising and reporting, and equal if not better in accuracy.

The AI-generated reports were presented to the Council’s Development and Conservation Advisory Committee.

The planning team at Sevenoaks District Council noted that meeting the reporting deadline would have been highly unlikely without The Future Fox's AI Consultation Analysis service..

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