Councils that publish comment tallies count them into camps: objecting, supporting, and the rest. Those numbers are the temperature of an application - and until now, reading them meant finding the right tab on the council register. Application pages now carry a Public comments block wherever the council publishes the figures.
The bar sits beside the national picture, and the national picture is blunt: of every comment we hold a split for, 81% object and 14% support. People write to councils to say no. An application pulling even a handful of supporting comments is doing something unusual, and now you can see that at a glance.
The counts are collected while an application is open and re-checked as it progresses, so a live application's figures move with the argument; once it's decided, the tally stands as the record. Where the register publishes a count but no split, we show the count. Where it publishes nothing, we say nothing rather than guess. Just over half of councils publish tallies today, and there's a link through to the register's comments tab whenever we hold it, so the representations themselves are one click away.
In the API and exports
Data customers get the same figures. Applications on GET /v1/applications carry a comments object - objections, supporting, received, consulted, and counted_at - and CSV exports carry the matching columns. Where a register publishes no figure, the fields are null, never zero: a zero from Plota means the council counted and found none.