How it works
Three parties.
One of them signs.
Planning is opaque mostly because nobody will tell you who is responsible for what. So this page starts there, and everything else follows from it.
Who
Wren
Gathers the data on your site, drafts every document your route requires, checks every citation against its source, and keeps you told.
Does not exercise professional judgement, and does not sign anything.
Your chartered planner
Reads the drafts in full, revises what needs revising, signs them under their own membership number, completes the council's forms, files the application, answers the case officer and takes it to a decision.
Named on your file from the day they are assigned.
The council
Validates the application, consults, assesses it against its own adopted plan, and decides.
Sets its own fee, which we pass on at cost.
The test applied to every sentence in this product: whose professional indemnity covers it.
The journey
From a line on a map to a decision notice.
Nine steps. You are involved in three of them, and the rest happen where you can see them.
01
You draw your site
Free, no account. Every constraint that touches the boundary comes back at once, with an approval likelihood, your council's own record, the documents your application will need and an itemised price.02
You answer some questions and pay once
A guided intake asks what you are proposing, who owns the site and what drawings you already have. The price is fixed at that point and itemised: Wren's fee, and your council's fee shown separately at cost. Card up to £3,000, bank transfer above it.03
Wren drafts the set
Not one document, and not a package you picked: the documents your route and your site's constraints actually require. Every statute, policy, listed building entry, flood zone and comparable in them is resolved against its live source before the draft is allowed out.04
A chartered planner reviews it
They get the draft with its reviewer queries sorted by how much each one matters, so they open on the questions that decide the document rather than on a missing letterhead. They download it as an editable file, revise it, and upload their version.05
They sign it
Two attestations, and a signature taken over the exact bytes of the file they uploaded, recorded with their chartered body, their membership number and the time.06
You read it and approve it
Only now can you read the contents, and nothing can be filed until you say so. Your approval is bound to the exact versions you were shown, so a document changing afterwards invalidates it rather than sliding through.07
Your planner files it
They complete the council's own forms, pay the fee, and lodge the pack. The council's reference goes on your file as soon as it is issued.08
The council runs its process
Validation, then consultation, then assessment, then a decision. Each one is recorded on your case as it happens, and you get an email within the hour when the stage you are on changes.09
The decision notice arrives
It goes on your file, with the conditions and the reasons. If it is a refusal, an appeal by written representations is a separate fixed fee, and the Planning Inspectorate charges nothing.
Why
Why it is built this way.
Two structural choices explain most of the rest.
Sell work, not software. Revenue arrives when an application is delivered, not per seat per month. That is why the map, the appraisal, the council library and 378 council profiles are free: there is no reason to meter the thing that helps you work out whether you even need us. If you read all of it and conclude you do not, that is a good outcome.
Someone must be answerable.An AI draft with nobody’s name on it transfers all the risk to the person least able to carry it, which is you. So every submission goes through a chartered professional who signs it under their own membership number, with their own indemnity behind it, and who is paid for the case only after your council has decided.
Evidence
There is no money-back guarantee.
There is something more useful: a published number.
Wren publishes its own rolling twelve-month grant rate against the national benchmark of 87.0%, broken down by application type, and only where the sample is more than twenty decided cases. Below that a percentage is noise dressed as evidence.
The methodology is stated in the response itself, and every case behind the figure is on a public planning register, so anyone who wants to check it can.
In depth
The four parts worth reading properly
How a document is drafted
11 checked categoriesWhat a citation gate is, why a draft that cannot verify a source fails instead of shipping, and what happens to the ones that fail.
What a chartered signature means
RTPI · IHBC · CIWEM and moreWho can sign, what they are attesting to, what is recorded, and what it would take to prove it years later.
Your approval
The hard stopWhy nothing can be filed without you, the exact words you agree to, and why the approval is bound to the specific documents you were shown.
After you submit
Validation to decisionWhat each council stage actually means, how long it takes, who chases whom, and what happens when the answer is no.
Start here
Start where it costs nothing.
Draw your site. See the constraints, the likelihood and the price before you decide anything at all.