Press
OpenConsult takes public consultation documents and makes them searchable, section by section, with every result citing its page in the official document. It links to the official response route and never replaces it.
We take no position on housing numbers, individual sites, or whether any plan is sound. We are not affiliated with any council, developer, campaign group or political party. Our one argument is about process: consultation periods do not scale with the size of what is being consulted on.
Who runs it. Sean Brannon, Proud Brands Limited. Built and funded independently, with no advertising, no trackers, no cookies, and no data collection. Get in touch through the contact form at the foot of this page.
Proud Brands is a digital agency in Aylesbury. It has no planning clients, no land interest, and no commercial stake in the outcome of any consultation on this site.
Verifying our figures
Every number is measured from the official published documents, not from council summaries. Page counts are exact. Open the PDF, check the page count, and you have our figure. Word counts are text extraction counts and will differ slightly from any publisher count, which is why we quote pages in headline figures.
Each entry links directly to the source document, so any figure we publish can be checked against the original in under a minute. The full comparison dataset, with the source URL for every consultation, is available as a CSV download.
Method: page counts are taken from the document itself, day counts are inclusive of first and last day, and reading times use an average adult reading speed of 238 words per minute. Where a document could not be measured, the cell is left blank. We do not estimate.
Reuse the data with attribution to openconsult.uk. Tell us if you find an error and we will correct it and say so.
Fact sheet
Figures correct as at 16 August 2026. Current figures at /scale/.
| Council | Stage | Dates | Days | Document |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South Warwickshire (Stratford-on-Avon and Warwick) | Regulation 19 | 21 Jul to 8 Sep 2026 | 50 | 543 pages |
| Buckinghamshire | Regulation 19 | 23 Jul to 6 Sep 2026 | 46 | 450 pages |
| Sevenoaks | Regulation 19 | 23 Jul to 17 Sep 2026 | 57 | not measured |
| Three Rivers | Regulation 19 | 31 Jul to 25 Sep 2026 | 57 | 408 page plan, 585 page appraisal |
| Stoke-on-Trent | Regulation 19 | six weeks from 3 Aug 2026 | 42 minimum | not measured |
Four of these opened within thirteen days of each other, all running across the school summer holidays, because every council continuing under the 2012 Regulations must submit to the Planning Inspectorate by 31 December 2026.
The Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012 were revoked on 25 March 2026 and replaced by the 2026 Regulations, which set flat minimums of six weeks for the plan content and evidence consultation and eight weeks for the proposed local plan consultation. Neither varies with the length or complexity of the document.
Quotes
Attributable to Sean Brannon, OpenConsult.
- “Every one of these consultations is lawful. That is the problem. The minimum takes no account of how long the document is, so it gets treated as the target.”
- “South Warwickshire published 543 pages and gave 50 days. Buckinghamshire published 450 and gave 46. The bigger document got less time, because the law does not ask for any relationship between the two.”
- “A consultation like this is one of the few times ordinary people are formally entitled to a say over their own area. It should not take eleven hours of reading to use it.”
Images
All free to use with attribution to openconsult.uk: logo in SVG and PNG, and the size against time chart from /scale/ as a standalone image. Screenshots of the explorer on request through the form below.
Contact
No email address is required; leave one only if you want a reply.