UK Planit News

Further miscellaneous news and information about the PlanIt website, including:

Coverage

This site covers almost all UK (and Crown Dependency) planning authorities. However in increasing numbers the data are being made unavailable. Details of these authorities and their websites are below. There is also a live list of planning areas that have not returned any planning data for the last 6 weeks.

Full data from earlier periods - but it is currently not possible to access planning data From the end of June 2026 these >20 Tascomi sites are barred by an AWS Captcha robot detection system Full data from earlier periods - but the most current data is intermittent Planning information provided as PDF documents only
  • Alderney - limited data from January 2020 onwards
  • Sark - inaccessible - no data available

Changes

October 2025 changes:

  • New 'developer' field allows text searches on agent/applicant addresses and company names.

June 2025 changes:

  • API now has 'decided', 'decided_start', 'decided_end' parameters to allow searches on decision dates.

March 2025 changes:

  • New planning authorities added for Welsh and Scottish major infrastructure and energy projects, in addition to those already existing for Northern Ireland, England and Wales
  • Renamed some Scottish areas for consistency (to append 'shire') -> Clackmannan, East Ayr, East Dunbarton, East Renfrew, North Ayr, North Lanark, Renfrew, South Ayr, South Lanark, West Dunbarton

October 2024 changes:

December 2023 changes:

  • API response content now limited to 1000kB in size.

July 2023 changes:

  • API now has 'changed', 'changed_start', 'changed_end', 'different', 'different_start', 'different_end' parameters to allow delta downloads of updated data.
  • The 'search' field now accepts multiple phrases in quotes and use of logical 'or' operator and '-' (not) prefix.
  • Live application documents and personal details are viewable - the 'Show Details' page for each planning application now has personal names and a table of links to the documents (where available).

API changed (January 2023) to add 'no_location' parameter to find applications missed by spatial searches because they have no location

Previous API changes (March 2022) are as follows:

  • Default page size for planning area queries set to 10
  • Errors now return a payload with an explanatory message in an 'error' field
  • The default error code is a 400, however if rate limits are exceeded a 429 status code is returned (look at the error message or the Retry-After header to see when you can try again).

Important site changes (July 2021) are as follows:

  • The underlying technology is now based on Python 3, PostgreSQL and PostgREST (was Python 2 and MongoDB)
  • Result and page caching has been improved
  • Output in CSV (comma separated values) and TSV (tab separated values) formats is now supported (and XML output has been discontinued)
  • There is a new 'Boundary' section which supports spatial searches based on uploaded or online GeoJSON boundaries
  • Full text search is supported as well as selection by size, type and state of the application
  • API changes:
    • Full application data is now returned in searches (no longer necessary to follow 'link' to the application)
    • The arbitrary API query 'limit' on total records to be found has been removed ('pg_sz' remains but is just a limit to the records returned)
    • New 'search' parameter for matching word phrases in the 'description' field (see the API)
    • New 'select' parameter to limit and rename the fields returned (see the API)
    • Additional planning applications data fields -> 'last changed', 'last different', 'location', 'location_x', 'location_y', 'n_statutory_days', 'n_dwellings', 'associated id' (see the Data Dictionary)
    • Spatial searching for intersecting planning areas using the same parameters as planning applications
    • Many additional planning area data fields with information on totals, type of scraper, date limits, regions and planning status (see the Data Dictionary)