🗂 Devlog #4 — Report Templates: Building the Narrative Spine

24 May, 2025

Drafting planning reports with structure, not style guides.

💡 Overview

Even the best AI reasoning is useless if it can’t land in a format planners actually use. That’s what the report template system is for: turning structured reasoning into editable officer report drafts, tailored by application type and designed to be recognisable, complete, and professional.

This devlog outlines how I’ve built a modular, policy-aware, planner-grade reporting engine — not to automate final decisions, but to produce strong first drafts that officers can review, adapt, and own.

🧱 What These Templates Are (and Aren’t)

Each report template acts as a structured scaffold — not a static PDF, not a blank text box. They encode:

• 📂 Section ordering: application summary, site context, constraints, policy, material considerations, conclusion
• 🔍 Reasoning blocks: dynamically populated by agents for each material consideration
• 🏛 Policy hooks: mapped to NPPF and Local Plan clauses
• 📝 Planner-facing annotations: placeholder logic, editable text fields, reasoning metadata
• 🧠 No styling fluff — just content that flows like a real report, waiting for a final human hand

These aren’t full automation tools. They’re designed for co-authorship — AI generates the bones, planners do the final sculpting.

📋 Coverage So Far

As of now, templates are implemented for over 20 real-world application types, including:

🏘 Core Applications

• Minor & Major Full Applications
• Outline Permission
• Reserved Matters
• Householder Extensions

🧾 Certificates & Amendments

• Certificate of Lawfulness (Existing & Proposed)
• Non-Material Amendments (s96A)
• Variation/Removal of Condition (s73)

🏛 Heritage, Trees & Other Consents

• Listed Building Consent
• Tree Works (TPO & Conservation Area)
• Advertisement Consent
• Demolition in Conservation Area
• Hazardous Substances

📦 Prior Approvals (GPDO)

• Agricultural Buildings
• Larger Home Extensions
• Telecommunications
• Change of Use (Class M, MA, etc.)

Each template is modular: it knows which reasoning cards to expect, which sections to show or hide, and how to flow from assessment to recommendation. Everything’s traceable and editable.

🚧 Still To Come

A few important types are still queued up:

• Discharge of Conditions (especially s106/s278 compliance reports)
• Minerals & Waste (county-led workflows)
• EIA screening/scoping templates
• Enforcement reports or breach assessments
• Planning appeal response logic

🧩 Template Mechanics in Practice

This system is more than a document generator — it's a structured interface between the AI's internal reasoning graph and the officer's narrative expectations. Each template serves three key roles:

• Slot-based logic scaffolding: Sections aren’t just headers — they’re insertion points for agent reasoning, constraint assessments, and policy synthesis. The template knows where each type of logic belongs.

• Material consideration routing: Each report type automatically links to the relevant material considerations, ensuring that the planning balance reflects only what’s pertinent to that application class.

• Policy-aware configuration: Templates include embedded NPPF hooks, Local Plan triggers, and even consent-specific legislation (e.g. for tree works, hazardous substances, listed buildings). That means the agent output is never floating — it’s grounded in the appropriate legal and policy spine.

This design allows AI outputs to align with human workflows without needing to reinvent formatting, logic, or expectation structures each time.

🔄 Next Steps

• Finalise templates for remaining edge-case applications (e.g. Discharge of Conditions, EIA, minerals, appeals, enforcement)
• Integrate template rendering with live LLM response preview and constraint summaries
• Enable per-section toggles, overrides, and policy hooks
• Add planner-side editing interface with inline revision history
• Refine modular structure to support nested material consideration injection
• Build export logic for both internal (PDF, Word) and public summary versions
• Prepare template-level configuration for LPAs with differing reporting standards

✍️ Closing Note

These templates aren’t about generating the final word. They’re about helping officers start with something solid — a draft rooted in the right structure, law, and reasoning. One they can revise, annotate, and stand behind.

“The goal isn’t to replace the officer — it’s to hand them a draft that feels like they already wrote it.”