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 a few cases the data are or were 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 planning data are currently not possible to access Full data from earlier periods - but planning data are currently difficult to access (intermittent data only) Planning information provided as PDF documents only
  • Alderney - limited data from January 2020 onwards
  • Sark - inaccessible - no data available
Sites that were restricting access (usually by CAPTCHA mechanisms) but have now seen the light and removed restrictions (hint!)

Changes

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)