UK PlanIt FAQ

Frequently asked questions about the PlanIt website:

How is PlanIt supported?

The site is run as a retirement hobby. It is not a commercial or for-profit enterprise. Donations are appreciated but they do not currently provide anywhere near enough funds to support the site. Instead it is funded by a small income from a few clients who pay for access to the underlying scraping software.

What is the future of PlanIt?

The site is run by one person on a "best efforts" basis which means that there are no guaranteed service standards or formal support mechanisms. While I have every intention of continuing to maintain the site for the medium term it would not be wise to base any commercial services on the API.

Is the full PlanIt dataset available?

No. I don't make the full dataset available or charge for basic access via the API. This is because the planning data are scraped from local government sites many of which are hedged round with legal disclaimers. These mean that I want to avoid any potential legal and contractual issues which might arise if my actions could be interpreted as implying ownership of the data.

What are the API rate limits?

To preserve functionality there is rate limiting to deter those trying to hoover up large quantities of data. I don't specify exactly what the limits are because I do not want users pushing the site capabilities - but you can safely make one request to the /api/applics endpoint every minute.

Is the underlying scraping software available?

A very early (2017) version of my open source scraping software UKPlanning is publicly available. The current UKPlanning code base is kept up to date but is not available publicly as I believe that many target sites would become swamped if a large cohort of users started to use the scrapers frequently. This step is taken so that PlanIt is perceived as a good net citizen and to encourage local planning authorities to remove blocking mechanisms such as ReCaptcha (see News)

Why are there no names in the API data?

Names of applicants, agents and case officers are not stored in the underlying database (to avoid any Data Protection issues). Instead there is a note ('See source') in the API data if the name is available in the source information.

Why do some planning applications have an inaccurate or absent spatial location?

In 64% of cases on the PlanIt database a location is directly specified in the application. In a further 27% of cases a location has been derived from the address postcode - however as each postcode covers many addresses this is necessarily not very accurate. In approximately 9% of cases there is no location for the application at all. In addition on the map display there is an added 'dither' (a random value equivalent to approx +-10m) which is added so that multiple applications with the same location do not overlap exactly.

Why do you not collect the documents?

PlanIt attempts to collect a document count and a link to the document list for each application. Other document details (titles and links) are not routinely collected for the database due to time and capacity constraints. However, if there is time during the display of a single planning application web page, the system will make a 'live' query to fill in these fields e.g. Bassetlaw/23/01395/HSE/. Collection of the documents themselves was found to be impractical because they are often large, in PDF format (hard to analyse) and on slow document storage systems.

Why do some areas include planning applications from other authorities?

By default non-planning areas such as regions or metropolitan counties will include the planning applications of the authorities contained within their boundaries. Non-unitary English counties have very small numbers of their own planning applications (minerals, waste, schools etc), so the default is also to include results from enclosed sub-areas (district councils) which have many more applications. You can change this behaviour by pressing the 'Modify' button then selecting 'Exclude sub-area applications'.

Andrew Speakman 16/04/2025