Before funding a development loan, lenders ask the same question: will this get planning permission?

Elevations has thoughts.

It's rarely a yes/no decision — it's a balance, weighed against a stack of local plan documents, changing national policy, and material considerations that shift by LPA and by site. Getting a first read on that balance has usually meant scheduling a planning consultant's time, or someone in-house losing an afternoon to cross-referencing documents.

We built a feature into Elevations that does that first pass in minutes: upload an applicant's Planning Statement, point it at the relevant national and local policy, and get back a risk score, a plain-language category, and a full written rationale — the shape of judgement a planning-literate underwriter would produce, based on the rationale a planning officer or committee would use.

A few things we cared about getting right:

• The score means the same thing every time. The model is fixed platform-wide, not picked per assessment — so a score on one development is actually comparable to a score on another, this quarter or next.
• The National Planning Policy Framework and local council plans are uploaded just once. Applications for developments are told which of these policies apply. And when they change? Policies are versioned and applications are updated to point at later policy as they come into force.
• Every run is filed, not just remembered. Re-assess a development later and the old analysis doesn't disappear — it stays, dated, alongside the new one. A loan book's planning-risk history becomes a paper trail, like a valuation or a credit paper.

This isn't a verdict — it's a fast, consistent first pass and recommendation a credit team can build their own judgement on top of. What it changes is the cost of asking the question at all.