UK Planit News
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:
Full data from earlier periods - but planning data are currently difficult to access (live list)- Sites currently restricted by reCAPTCHA
- Tower Hamlets London Borough Council - after July 2023
- Brent London Borough Council - after March 2022
- Newcastle Under Lyme Borough Council - after February 2022
- Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council - after July 2021
- Carlisle City Council - after November 2020
- Milton Keynes Council - after September 2020
- Sites with intermittent data
- Westminster City Council - from November 2022
- Sites with other issues
- Braintree District Council - data up to November 2023
- Hampshire County Council - data up to April 2023
- Preston City Council - data up to February 2023 (CAPTCHA)
- Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council - data up to October 2019
- Surrey County Council - data up to January 2019
- Alderney - limited data from July 2021 onwards
- Blaenau Gwent - limited data from from January 2015 onwards
- Sark - inaccessible - no data available
- Lewisham London Borough Council - August 2023 to October 2023
- Croydon London Borough Council - May 2023 to August 2023
- City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council - January 2023 to May 2023
- Northumberland County Council - April 2022 to May 2023
- Chelmsford City Council - July 2021 to November 2022
- Woking Borough Council - May 2021 to ?
- Cheshire West and Chester Council - April 2021 to ?
- Greater Cambridge Shared Planning (Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District Councils) - February 2021 to ?
- Colchester Borough Council - December 2020 to ?
- Leeds City Council - September 2020 to September 2022
- Peak District National Park - March 2020 to ?
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)