Civic & Government /Drafting interactive demo field guide · 9 min

Policy Brief Drafter

Turns a councillor's Notice of Motion and the attached background docs into a first-pass, costed policy brief with every figure traced to its source — in hours, not days.

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theater/demos/civic-gov_policy-brief-drafter.html · sandbox · read-only

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FIG. 1

The live demo, running on fabricated data. Open it to step through the full flow — every output is shown for a person to approve before anything happens.

How it would work

Reads the Notice of Motion and its attachments, extracts every brief parameter with a source against it, drafts a costed option with the statutory risks flagged, and holds it for the responsible officer to verify and approve before it reaches the agenda.

Input 01

The request + its attachments

A brief request — a councillor's Notice of Motion or email — plus the background documents it points at: strategies and action plans, the asset register, and the grants register.

Agent 02

Extracts, costs, flags

Pulls each brief parameter and tags it with its source, drafts a recommended costed option with itemised capital lines, and raises the statutory and probity risks it can see in the documents.

Output 03

A draft, with its working shown

A complete draft brief — costing, sources, and risk flags — held for the responsible officer to verify against current records, edit, and approve before anything goes on the council agenda.

Where it works well

It does the assembly-before-the-writing every time, in full, and shows where each figure came from.

The drafter does that assembly in minutes and lays it out with a source against every parameter — "NoM p.1", "CAP §4.2", "asset register".
Best for a policy or governance officer in a council on a regular committee cycle with hard agenda deadlines, where briefs follow a recognisable shape — trigger, scope, options, costing, statutory alignment, risks.
The recaptured hunting time goes back into the analysis that actually matters — the right option, the political and equity read — not the document archaeology.

The slow, invisible cost in a policy team is not writing the brief — it is the assembly before it: which action in the Climate Change Action Plan this touches, how many car parks are in scope, what grant might apply, what the Local Government Act requires. Done by hand that is two or three days of hunting through PDFs.

Where it works badly

It is confidently wrong when the source documents are stale — and the clean brief looks more trustworthy than the data behind it.

A plausible brief resting on a superseded figure invites less scrutiny than an obviously rough draft — the polish is the danger.
Weak where the real work is political judgement, not document assembly — a contentious rezoning, where reading the chamber matters more than the action plan. There the costed option is the easy part and the tool adds least.

The honest test

Look at your last five briefs: if most of the effort was finding and reconciling figures across documents you already hold, this helps a lot — if most of it was judgement about what to recommend and how it will land, this helps at the margins and the officer still does the hard part.

If your asset register is two years out of date, the scope figure it extracts — "47 council-owned car parks" — is confidently wrong, and the costing built on it is wrong too, presented in the same official-looking format as a correct one. That is the trap.

What it doesn't do — and shouldn't

It drafts. The responsible officer approves. That boundary is deliberate.

WHAT IT DOES

Surfaces each extracted parameter with the document and section it came from

Shows the costed option line by line, before any grant offset

Flags the statutory and probity tripwires it can see — e.g. a third-party operator model likely exceeding the council's public-tender threshold

WHAT IT WON’T

Decide which option the council should pursue

Put anything on the council agenda

Vouch that the costing is defensible or the equity read is right

A policy brief is an instrument of a democratic decision, made under the overarching governance principles in the Local Government Act 2020. Accountability for it has to sit with an accountable human — the responsible officer, and then the councillors who vote — not a draft generator. The tool gets the officer to a defensible starting point faster; it does not make the call.

What your data has to look like

The source documents must actually exist as readable files, be tagged to specific sections, and be current.

Typical readiness

across orgs we see, before the first job

Notices of Motion captured as files

Needs shaping

Action plans & strategies, retrievable and section-tagged

Usual weak point

An asset register current enough to trust for scope

Needs shaping

A grants register reflecting open programs

Needs shaping

The relevant statutory references to hand

Usual weak point

The real first job

Most councils have some of this in good shape and some of it scattered — a strategy in SharePoint, an asset list in a spreadsheet on someone's drive, a grants picture in someone's head. Getting those into a consistent, retrievable, current state is usually the real first job — more about how information is captured and where it lives than about buying a tool, and typically larger and more valuable than the drafting layer on top of it.

Right fit if…

Your council runs a regular committee or council-meeting cycle with hard agenda deadlines

Briefs are triggered by Notices of Motion and follow a recognisable shape

You hold a known set of strategies, action plans and registers a brief draws on

Most of your brief effort goes on finding and reconciling figures you already hold

Walk away if…

Your asset and grants registers are stale and nobody owns keeping them current

Notices of Motion live only inside meeting minutes, not as separate files

Most briefs turn on political judgement, not document assembly

You want a tool that signs off the legal and probity check for you

Open questions

The worried-buyer questions, answered straight

It can, which is why the draft is a starting point, not a decision. The drafter flags the obvious statutory tripwires it can see — for example, that a third-party operator model is likely to exceed the council’s public-tender threshold set in its Procurement Policy under section 108 of the Local Government Act 2020, and needs probity sign-off before any tender. But it only flags what is visible in the documents it was given. The responsible officer still owns the legal and probity check; the tool just means fewer of those checks get skipped under deadline pressure.

That is the real risk, and it is why every extracted parameter carries a source tag — “NoM p.1”, “CAP section 4.2”, “asset register” — so the officer can see exactly where each figure came from before trusting it. If your asset register is out of date or your cost figures are stale, the brief will faithfully reproduce that. The tool makes the provenance visible so a person can catch it; it does not vouch for the underlying data.

No. It replaces the blank-page hours — pulling the Notice of Motion apart, hunting through the action plan and registers, assembling a first costed option. The judgement that makes a brief defensible — is this the right option, is the costing realistic, what is the political and equity read — stays with the officer. They get a draft to interrogate instead of a deadline and a blank document, and the recaptured time goes back into the analysis that actually matters.

As current as the decision it informs. A capital costing built off a two-year-old asset register or a superseded grant round will be wrong in ways that matter at a council meeting. The drafter reads whatever documents you point it at; it cannot tell that a strategy is out of date or a grant program has closed. Keeping the source registers and action plans current is part of what makes the output trustworthy — and is usually the work that needs doing first.

The drafter reads from your existing document stores and the draft brief stays inside your environment, held for officer review. Pre-decision council positions and Notices of Motion are sensitive, and it is built so they are not sent anywhere they shouldn’t be; the exact hosting and data-handling boundary is set with your IT and records team during scoping, against your information-management and public-records obligations. The demo here runs entirely on fabricated data — Cr. Helen Patsikatheodorou and Hume’s “47 car parks” are not real records.

What it takes to build

8–10 weeks · 4 phases

Reused from template~60%

Bespoke to this skin~40%

stack · Claude · document store · review UI

What it would cost

Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates.

Bite-sized first piece

One contained change, low risk

Pilot build

Most builds land here

Embedded support

Scale on proof

Considering this for your council?

The honest place to start is a bite-sized first piece — one contained change, low risk. Tell us where the brief grind hurts; we'll play it back, scope it, and show you what's possible.

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