Planning Letters

Privacy notice

Last updated: 12 June 2026.

PLANNING LETTERS LTD (company number 17253269, registered office 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ) is the data controller for the personal data described here. ICO registration number: ZC164022. Contact: privacy@planningletters.co.uk.

What we collect, and where it goes

  • Order form submission. Your name, email address, postal address, phone number (if given), the planning application reference, your relationship to the site, your grounds, and the free text you write about your concerns and personal context. When you pay, the structured fields travel inside the Stripe checkout session record; the free-text fields are stored on our own server (hosted with Fly.io in London) and retrieved by reference. Once your case is created, everything is held together in your case file on that server.
  • Payment record. Amount, date, and the Stripe session and payment identifiers. We never see or store your card details; Stripe handles card data on its own systems.
  • Drafting. The text of your intake is sent to Anthropic’s Claude API to assist drafting and citation checking. Anthropic does not train on API traffic by default.
  • Delivery and case administration. The PDF we send you, the address we sent it to, timestamps, and internal notification emails about your case (which include your name and application reference) sent through Postmark.
  • Website. The site sets no analytics cookies and uses no third-party analytics. Your browser’s local storage is used for two first-party purposes: saving your order-form draft on your own device, and remembering how you first arrived at the site (campaign tags on the link you followed, or the referring page) so that, if you place an order, that source is recorded with your case. None of this leaves your device unless you order; it is never shared with advertisers, and clearing your browser’s site data removes it. If you use the coverage waitlist, the email you enter is sent to us and stored with the page you asked from. Our pages currently load fonts from Google Fonts, which means your IP address is disclosed to Google when a page loads; we are moving to self-hosted fonts.

Lawful bases

  • Contract performance for everything required to draft and deliver your letter.
  • Legal obligation for the payment records we must keep for tax purposes.
  • Legitimate interests for internal case administration and service protection, balanced against your rights.

How long we keep it

Case files (intake, drafts, the delivered PDF, delivery record) are kept for three years from delivery, for tax compliance and dispute handling, then deleted. Deletion is currently a manual, scheduled process rather than an automated one. You may request earlier deletion of the free-text portions of your intake any time after delivery; the structured payment record must be kept for the full period.

Who we share it with

  • Stripe (payment processing)
  • Postmark (email delivery)
  • Anthropic (Claude API, drafting assistance)
  • Fly.io (hosting; our server and storage run in their London region)
  • Google (fonts on page load, until we self-host; IP address only)

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with anyone else except where the law requires.

What happens after delivery

Planning representations become public documents when submitted. Because you submit the letter yourself, your name and the substance of the letter will appear on the council’s planning portal as a consequence of your submission, not ours.

Your rights

You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure (subject to the retention rule above), restriction, portability, and objection. Email privacy@planningletters.co.uk and we will respond within one month.

Complaints

You can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. We would appreciate the chance to put it right first.