Privacy Policy

PlanningPath is operated by Raines Digital Ltd ("we", "us", "PlanningPath"), a company registered in England & Wales. We are the data controller for any personal data processed on this site. This policy explains what we collect, why, how long we keep it, who we share it with, and your rights under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. We have tried to write it in plain English; the ICO's own guidance says legalese is a transparency failure.

What we collect

We collect only the minimum data we need to give you a useful planning assessment and (if you buy a paid pack) deliver it:

• Email address — so we can send you your assessment and, if you buy, your pack.
• Postcode and address — to identify your council and auto-detect designations such as conservation areas, AONB, Article 4 directions and listed buildings. Selecting your exact address also helps us pre-fill the property type.
• Project answers (dimensions, building type, materials, prior extensions) — the specific information the GPDO rule engine needs to assess your project.
• Applicant details (paid customers only) — your full name and property address so the Lawful Development Certificate letter is ready to submit.
• Payment information — processed directly by Stripe. We never see or store your card details; we receive only a payment reference and billing email.
• Technical data — IP address, browser type, pages visited. Used for security, rate limiting and diagnosing faults. No advertising or cross-site tracking.

Legal bases for processing

Under UK GDPR Article 6, we rely on:

• Contract— to deliver the free assessment or paid pack you've asked for.
• Legitimate interests — to follow up on abandoned assessments, request post-purchase feedback (with a one-click unsubscribe), prevent fraud, and keep the service secure. You can object at any time.
• Legal obligation — to keep financial records required by HMRC and UK company law.

How long we keep it

Your assessment, any generated PDF, and personal data attached to it (email, applicant name and address, postcode) are automatically anonymised 12 months after the session was created. Roughly 30 days before that we email a reminder so you can download anything you need. The anonymised session row is retained so we can spot patterns across projects, but it can no longer be traced back to you.

Email history — we record the fact that an email was sent (recipient address, email type, timestamp) to prevent duplicates and give us a delivery audit trail. These records are not automatically time-expired, but they are deleted if you use /delete-my-data, and the recipient email on any pre-existing record is cleared when the linked session is anonymised at 12 months.

Financial records (Stripe payment references, invoices) are retained for 6 years to satisfy HMRC and Companies House requirements. These are kept in Stripe and in our accounting records; the copy we hold is minimal.

Refund claims — if you submit a refund claim via /refund, the intake row is retained for audit under consumer-rights legislation even if you later request deletion, but your email is redacted to [redacted] and your free-text notes are cleared.

Who we share it with

We don't sell your data. We share it with the sub-processors below, each under a UK GDPR-compliant contract, and only to the extent necessary to run the service:

• Stripe Payments UK Ltd — payment processing. Receives your email and billing details at checkout. See Stripe's privacy notice.
• Resend (Resend, Inc.) — transactional email delivery. Receives your email address and the message content we send you.
• Supabase (Supabase, Inc.) — database and PDF storage. Data hosted in the EU region.
• Vercel Inc. — website hosting. Receives request metadata (IP address, user-agent, URL path) for delivery and security; retained in aggregate logs for up to 30 days.
• Ordnance Survey (OS Places API) — address and property-type lookup. We send your postcode (and, on address selection, the returned UPRN) to populate the wizard with authoritative address data.
• postcodes.io — postcode validation and council lookup. We send your postcode only.
• planning.data.gov.uk — official UK planning-data service. We send approximate coordinates derived from your postcode or selected address to auto-detect designations (conservation area, AONB, Article 4, listed buildings). No personal data is sent.

International transfers

Some of our sub-processors are US-incorporated (Stripe, Resend, Vercel, Supabase). Data transfers outside the UK are covered by the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or by adequacy decisions where applicable. We've chosen providers that commit to treating UK data under UK GDPR regardless of where they're headquartered.

Cookies

PlanningPath uses a very small number of cookies, described in full in our Cookie Policy. In brief: one httpOnly session cookie to resume your wizard, plus any cookies Stripe sets on the checkout page itself. No advertising or cross-site trackers, and no analytics cookies requiring consent — so no cookie banner is shown.

Automated decisions and AI

The verdict you see is produced by a deterministic rule engine that applies the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015 (as amended) to your inputs. There is no LLM or other AI model in that decision path today.

In a forthcoming release we plan to add AI assistance for some generative sections (for example, polished prose in LDC cover letters and Planning Statements). Before that ships, we'll update this page to name the AI sub-processor, explain what inputs are sent, and confirm the provider's commitment not to train on your data. You will not be subject to decisions with legal effect produced solely by automated processing (UK GDPR Article 22) — a human-reviewable audit trail accompanies every verdict.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you have the right to:

• Access — ask for a copy of the data we hold about you.
• Correction — ask us to correct inaccuracies.
• Deletion(Article 17 — right to erasure) — self-serve at /delete-my-data. Enter your email, click the link we send, and everything identifying is removed immediately. Anonymised assessment records are retained for analytics, and the legally-required elements listed under “How long we keep it” above are preserved.
• Restriction — ask us to pause processing while a query is resolved.
• Portability — receive your data in a machine-readable format.
• Object — object to processing based on legitimate interests (e.g. follow-up emails).
• Withdraw consent— where we've relied on it, at any time.

Deletion is self-serve at /delete-my-data. For access, correction, restriction, portability, objection or withdrawal of consent, email support@planningpath.co.uk. We respond within one calendar month as required by UK GDPR.

Complaints

If we haven't resolved a privacy concern to your satisfaction, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk. We'd appreciate the chance to resolve things directly first — email support@planningpath.co.uk.

Security

Data in transit is encrypted with TLS 1.2 or above. Data at rest is encrypted by our database provider (Supabase). Access to the production database is restricted to named administrators with two-factor authentication. We review our security practices regularly and log errors to an internal monitoring system that redacts email addresses and personal details before storage.

Changes to this policy

We'll update this page when our practices change and update the “Last updated” date at the top. Material changes (for example, adding an AI sub-processor or changing retention periods) will be notified by email to active customers at least 14 days before they take effect.

Contact

Data controller: Raines Digital Ltd.
Registered in England & Wales, company no. [company-number].
Registered office: [registered-office-address].
ICO data-protection registration: [ICO-registration-number] (where applicable).
Email: support@planningpath.co.uk