About

We found out about a twenty year plan for Buckinghamshire from a local news site, with more than half the response window already gone.

The plan shapes the county to 2045: where 91,287 homes go, what happens to the Green Belt, which villages change for good. It runs to 450 pages of planning language, with thousands more pages of evidence behind it. The public was given 46 days to respond, in the middle of the school summer holidays.

Did the council have to stop at 46 days? No. The law sets a minimum of six weeks at this stage and no maximum. More time was always available. The council chose four days above the floor.

Buckinghamshire is not alone. At least five local plan consultations are open in England right now, four of them launched within thirteen days of each other into the same school holidays, and the two largest documents were given the two shortest windows.

Until the law ties consultation time to the size of what is being consulted on, the minimum will keep being treated as the target.

A consultation like this is one of the few moments when ordinary people are formally entitled to a say over their own area. So we built this. The official documents, split into their real sections, tagged by theme and place, fully searchable, every result citing its page in the official PDF, with a plain English version of every policy (clearly marked as ours, not the council’s), and the formal response route and your councillors one click away.

We do not decide what matters. We make it findable, cite our sources, and show our working.