How OTTO answers.

Most AI answers from memory and hopes it remembered right.OTTO answers the way a good planning lawyer does: read everything, find the governing passages, quote them, and have the work checked. Five phases, none optional.

Phase 01 · The library

Read everything that governs.

The planning Acts, the GPDO, the Use Classes Order, the NPPF, and each district's own plans: OTTO holds the full text, split into 3,623 passages, each tagged with its legal tier and status. The library is checked nightly against the official registers, because advice built on a superseded paragraph is worse than no advice.

National law and policy

TCPA 1990
GPDO 2015
PCPA 2004
P&I Act 2025
NPPF 2026
Listed Buildings Act
DMPO 2015
Use Classes Order

Your district’s layer

Adopted Local Plan
Neighbourhood Plan
Emerging Local Plan
Evidence Base

Every document read in full, not summarised.

Phase 02 · Retrieval

Find the passages that govern the question.

Four searches run at once: one for meaning, one for exact words, one for policy codes like H1 or paragraph 11(d), and one through a hand-verified table of which policies govern which designations. The last one matters most: knowing that a conservation area invokes particular policies is legal knowledge, not word-matching, and it is checked by a person before it is trusted by the machine.

Phase 03 · The answer

Quoted, never paraphrased.

The answer is written only from the retrieved passages, and every claim is tied to a verbatim quotation with its document and paragraph reference. No claim, no quote, no exceptions. This is what one looks like:

Question

What weight can a decision-maker give to an emerging local plan?

Weight is a matter for the decision-maker, but national policy fixes the three controlling factors: the stage of preparation the emerging plan has reached, the extent of unresolved objections to the relevant policies, and their degree of consistency with national policy [1]. Until adoption, determination must still be made in accordance with the adopted development plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise [2].

  1. [1]SAMPLE ONLY (dev fixture), para 48In forceNational policy
    “…the more advanced its preparation, the greater the weight that may be given… the less significant the unresolved objections, the greater the weight… the closer the policies in the emerging plan to the policies in the Framework, the greater the weight…”
  2. [2]SAMPLE ONLY (dev fixture), s.38(6)In forceStatute
    “…the determination must be made in accordance with the plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise.”

Not fully verified, check the quotes · Sources checked nightly · Generated 11 July 2026

Phase 04 · Verification

Checked against the passages it cites.

Before an answer reaches you, an independent checker reads every claim against the passages the answer cites, hunting for anything they do not support. If that raises any doubt, the answer is re-examined further against the full Framework, and one that still fails is shown to you flagged rather than hidden. And when the documents simply do not answer the question, OTTO says so plainly. Declining to guess is a feature: a confident wrong answer is the most expensive thing an AI can give you.

Phase 05 · The gate

No release without the exam.

The whole system sits a 57-question audited exam: trick questions, out-of-date-law traps, and questions the documents genuinely cannot answer. Five gates, five pass bars, results published in full whether it passes or fails. The latest run scored 100% on citations and 100% on grounding, and you can mark any published answer yourself against the public documents.

Read the benchmark →See real answers