Reeve is a compliance and procedure assistant built for Brighton & Hove City Council specifically, loaded with your own constitution, scheme of officer delegations, financial regulations and contract standing orders. Ask it a real question in plain language and it answers in context, citing the exact part and article, grounded entirely in your council's own documentation — never in general knowledge dressed up as council policy.
Built for a Unitary Authority
One set of rules to hold, not a county/district split to model — Reeve's knowledge base mirrors Brighton & Hove's own Leader and Cabinet structure directly.
Constitution basics, committee and cabinet structure, officer delegations, financial regulations, contract standing orders and both codes of conduct — all in one place.
The Key Decision threshold — expenditure or savings above this, or a significant effect on two or more wards, triggers the formal process.
The ceiling below which any officer can procure directly, without Procurement team involvement — above it, different rules apply.
Who It's For
Chief Financial Officer & Section 151 duties
- Answers ground themselves in the council's own financial regulations and standard financial procedures, not a generic textbook version.
- Every answer cites the specific part, article or table, so it can be checked rather than simply trusted.
- A defensible, purpose-built tool for statutory duty — a stronger governance story than staff using consumer AI tools unsupervised.
Procurement Officers
- The £29,999 direct-procurement ceiling and Contract Standing Orders sit in the same answer, so the statutory floor and the local rule are never split across two lookups.
- Ask plainly: "Can I award this without a full tender?" and get the rule, the threshold and the source together.
- Upload a contract or policy PDF straight into a conversation — no retyping, no separate reference lookup.
Members
- Committee and Cabinet structure, the Budget and Policy Framework and the Code of Conduct for Members are all one question away, in plain language.
- No conversation content is ever stored — sessions are private and leave no record.
- Each council's Reeve is fully separate infrastructure, never shared with another authority.
Any council employee
- Conduct, conflicts of interest and delegation questions answered against the council's own Code of Conduct for Employees, not general guidance.
- Voice readback for hands-free use, and a private per-employee sign-in — nothing to set up yourself.
- Give as much context as you like — role, scenario, what's actually at stake — the more detail, the sharper the answer.
Training & CPD
Reeve doubles as an in-house training tool. Scenarios do not need to be real — an invented situation, run through a genuine question, works just as well for building understanding as a live case.
Run a team through a real or invented scenario, log the date, topic and attendees, and build a genuine CPD record — evidence of real engagement, not a certificate nobody remembers earning.
Because every answer cites the source part or article, a training session leaves a trail back to the actual rule — useful evidence if a decision is ever questioned later.
Getting Started — Onboarding
Sign in. Staff with Microsoft 365 access sign in with their existing Entra ID account once IT has switched this on — nothing new to remember. Until then, an access code lets pilot users straight in.
A short one-off form. Role (Councillor, Officer, Manager or New Starter), department and grade — so Reeve can tailor its answers to what actually matters for that role. Entered once, editable any time, never pulled from HR or Entra ID itself.
Ask a real question. No slide deck, no training video required first — the fastest way to see whether Reeve is useful is to ask it something you'd genuinely need to know.
Why This, Why Now
Full-load, not lossy search. Reeve reads the whole knowledge base every time, so it can never silently skip a rule the way keyword or vector search sometimes does — a deliberate choice for a compliance-critical domain.
Your council's own layer. National law sits alongside Brighton & Hove's own constitution and local rules in the same answer.
Prepare changes privately, switch safely. The next version of Reeve's knowledge base can be built and tested in private, then go live with one action — and revert instantly if needed.
Never shared, never mixed. Brighton & Hove's Reeve is fully isolated — its own database, its own storage, its own sign-in — the same discipline the council would expect from any system holding its own records.
A short working demonstration, using Brighton & Hove's own real questions, is the fastest way to see whether this is genuinely useful — not a slide deck.
Open Reeve →