UK planning data should
be easier to access.

UK planning data is spread across hundreds of websites

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different planning systems. Within them, individual planning authorities publish applications through their own registers. There isn’t one complete government database where you can search every UK application.

Say you want to find extensions approved near your home. If you live close to a council boundary, you may need to search two registers. Each can have different filters, date ranges and ways of describing the same type of work. Doing that once is annoying. Repeating it every week, or across dozens of areas, becomes a job in itself.

Councils also buy different software. In our register discovery work, we’ve found Idox Public Access, Tascomi, Agile, Arcus, Northgate and Ocella, as well as other systems. Even two councils using the same supplier can have different website layouts and settings.

That matters when you try to collect the data automatically. Code that reads one register may not work on another. A council changing its software can break a previously working connection.

Government dataset: 100k applications from four councils

The government is working on this through planning.data.gov.uk. It publishes planning and housing data for England, including conservation areas and brownfield land. But its planning application dataset is much more limited than you might expect.

We downloaded the government’s application CSV and counted the records by council. All 100,627 rows were assigned to these four authorities:

Camden makes up about 77% of those records. Our wider benchmark includes around 420 authorities, so the four represented here amount to roughly 1% of that number.

Our estimate is based on published planning indexes and includes historical records and some Crown Dependency coverage. The government platform covers England. The percentages give a sense of scale: dates and authority definitions differ, and we haven’t checked every record for overlap or duplication.

The government’s dataset page lists 17 September 2025 as the last date new data was found. Its documentation says the application standard is still in development and authorities aren’t currently required to publish to it. So there’s useful work under way, but this dataset won’t yet tell you what’s happening across the country.

Some council websites block automated collection

When a council doesn’t offer a download or an API — a way for software to request data directly — the alternative is usually scraping. That means software reading the same public pages you’d open in a browser and extracting fields such as the reference, address and decision.

Some portals use CAPTCHAs and other bot checks to prevent this. A person may still be able to open an application, while software trying to collect the same public information gets stopped at a challenge page. That can leave a database with older records but no recent updates.

There are sensible reasons to limit automated traffic: a busy collector shouldn’t slow down a council’s website. But blocking collection without offering a usable feed leaves everyone else doing manual searches. We don’t think that serves the public interest.

A supplier, council or hosting provider may be responsible for a particular restriction. Whoever configures it, there should be a practical way to reuse public application data. A daily download or a documented API with reasonable request limits would avoid much of this work.

A large database can still have gaps

A headline record count doesn’t tell you how useful a database will be for your search. Millions of historical applications won’t help you find this week’s proposals if the connection to your council has stopped updating.

There are several things to check: which councils are included, how far back their records go, when they were last updated, and whether the entries contain full details or just a reference and description.

This is why we think coverage information should sit alongside the search itself. If a council’s data is missing or out of date, you should know before relying on the results.

We’re collecting UK applications in one searchable database

Our aim is to let you search by location or proposal without having to know which council website to use. We’re building collectors for council registers and bringing their records into a common format.

There’s plenty of less visible work involved. References need to stay tied to the right council. An application can change after it first appears. Dates can be missing, and different registers use different status labels. We need to keep those details accurate rather than just add more rows.

This should help with ordinary questions: what’s been proposed nearby, what happened to a similar application, or which new projects are relevant to your business. We keep links to the original council records so you can check the details and find the consultation information.

What would make planning data easier to use?

Councils don’t all need to use the same software. Agreeing how to publish the basic data would make a big difference. Here’s what we’d like to see:

01 Downloads and APIs

Let people download application records as a spreadsheet or request them through an API, with clear limits on how often they can do so.

02 Consistent fields

Publish references, addresses, dates and decisions in agreed formats. Explain local differences rather than leaving everyone to guess what a status means.

03 Dates and coverage notes

Say when the data was updated and which years it includes. If a feed stops working, say so. No search results and no data are two different things.

04 Clear rules on reuse

Explain what people can reuse and under which licence. Keep unnecessary personal details out of bulk feeds, and preserve links to the council’s application pages.

We’d like councils to ask for these things when buying planning software, and suppliers to include them as standard. Until then, services like ours will spend a lot of time collecting information that could be much simpler to publish.