About

Public notices that affect where people live are published in The Gazette in legal language that is hard to read and hard to search by place. This tool finds the notices near a postcode or town and reads them back in plain English, each linked to the notice as published.

How the plain English is made, and checked

A language model reads the notice and returns the facts (what is changing, where, from when, who published it, how to object) and a two- or three-sentence summary. Every place name must appear word for word in the notice or it is dropped. Every summary sentence is then checked against the notice by a second step that must return a supporting quote that really is in the text; a sentence that fails is removed and counted. The model never writes advice: where a notice says how to object, that sentence is quoted, not composed.

What it covers, and what it refuses

Covered: Transport, Town and Country Planning, Environmental Protection, Water Resources, Forestry and Plant Health, Electricity.

Refused at every layer, by design: State: commissions and appointments (names individuals); Parliament and assemblies; Marriage Acts (names individuals); National Savings (names individuals); Medicines; Royal Mail; Other notices (mixed; may name individuals); Corporate insolvency (out of scope by rule); Personal insolvency (names individuals; out of scope by rule); Deceased estates and Trustee Act notices (names individuals); Partnerships (names individuals). The Gazette's licence does not cover personal data, and this tool is not for finding out about people.

Numbers so far

• Notices read: 92; plain-English versions made: 92
• Generated sentences kept: 256; removed by the check: 27
• Feedback: 0 accurate, 0 wrong or unclear
• Searches by day: 2026-10-21: 1; 2026-10-19: 3; 2026-10-18: 4

Model in use: azure/gpt-4.1-mini. Built with an AI coding assistant under the author's direction, in the author's own time, with open data. The evaluation and its results are available on request.