About this site

Where our evidence comes from

Everything on this site comes from public sources:

• the council's own recordings of its Strategic Planning Committee and Full Council meetings, published on its YouTube channel;
• the agendas, reports, minutes and attendance records on the council's committee website;
• the Local Plan evidence documents published by the council.

We quote people's exact words and link to the moment they said them, so you can hear the full context. We report what was said at public meetings. We don't make claims about anyone's motives.

How the transcripts were made

We downloaded the audio of each council recording and transcribed it with automatic speech recognition software (Whisper). Machine transcripts are good but not perfect. The software doesn't know who is speaking, and it often mishears names and local places. To make the transcripts readable we have:

• corrected names and terms the software consistently mishears. For example: "purple bed heaths" is shown as "Pebblebed Heaths", "Exmo 20", "Expo 20" and "Expert 20" as "EXMO20", "Helar" as "HELAA", "Budley" as "Budleigh", "Limpstone" as "Lympstone", "Malcolm" as "Marlcombe" (the proposed new town) and "Clist" as "Clyst". Councillors' surnames are spelt as in the council's attendance records;
• removed lines the software repeated, and joined the fragments into paragraphs;
• highlighted EXMO20 and St John's;
• removed the names of members of the public who spoke, as far as we could;
• left out passages that contain allegations or strong accusations against named people or the council. These are marked in the transcript, and the time stamp still plays the council's recording, so nothing is hidden.

We haven't changed any other words. Each paragraph starts with a time stamp that opens the council's recording at that moment. If a quote matters to you, please listen to the clip.

How we compared the minutes

For each meeting we read the council's printed minutes alongside the full transcript and noted points about EXMO20 and the Local Plan that the minutes leave out, record differently or cut down. Minutes are summaries by design, and leaving something out isn't wrongdoing. We list these points so that anyone relying on the minutes, including the Planning Inspector, can also hear what was said.

Privacy

This site doesn't use cookies, analytics, tracking pixels, adverts or embedded videos, and it loads no fonts or scripts from other websites. Links to YouTube, Facebook and openPetition take you to those sites, which have their own privacy policies. We don't collect personal data here. If you email us, we'll use your message only to reply and won't share it.

Corrections

We work hard to get things right. If you think something on this site is wrong or unfair, please contact us and we'll look at it quickly. That includes any councillor or officer we quote.

This site sets out evidence from public records. It is not legal advice.