Different systems
Planning portals come from a handful of suppliers, and each publishes a different amount in a different shape. Some give you floor areas and a site plan. Some give you a sentence.
Coverage
Where we read,
and how well.
No planning data company covers the country evenly, and the ones that say they do are counting rows rather than answering your question. Yours is simpler: will enough work appear near me to be worth paying for. This page is how we answer it.
01 — What we read
Official records, not a rewritten copy.
Everything here comes from the planning registers themselves and from central government’s own constraint data. Some parts of the country publish far more than others, which is what the rest of this page is about.
The application
Address, proposal, validation date, decision and conditions — with a link straight back to the council’s own page for it.
The site
Every application geocoded and plotted, with floor areas and site outlines wherever the authority publishes them.
What constrains it
Conservation areas, Article 4 directions, listed buildings, tree preservation orders and flood risk, drawn over the top.
Where two records describe the same application, the fuller one updates the other in place rather than appearing twice in your results.
02 — The grading
We do not tell you how many rows we hold.
Record counts are our question, not yours. One London borough holds a hundred thousand applications and produces fewer householder jobs a month than a seaside town holding four thousand. Counting the pile tells you nothing about whether next month has work in it.
So each council is graded on the two things that actually decide it: householder jobs a month, and how long since anything new arrived. The second can overrule the first. A council averaging fifty jobs a month that has published nothing since June is not a fifty-a-month council today, and saying so before you pay is cheaper for everyone than saying it after.
| Grade | What it means | Worth subscribing on its own? |
|---|---|---|
| Strong | Twenty or more householder jobs a month, arriving now. | Yes |
| Workable | Ten to twenty a month. Real, but modest. | Good inside a radius; thin as your only patch |
| Thin | Occasional work only. | No — worth watching, not worth buying |
| Still building history | We have read this council for less than a fortnight. Search works; the volume figure would not mean anything yet. | Ask us |
| In the feed | We read this register. Nothing with a usable date in the last three years yet. | Ask us |
| Not currently updating | We hold history but nothing new has come through. We will be chasing the source. | Not yet |
Every council we actually read appears below with its grade, including the ones graded badly. If a council is not on this list, we cannot keep its register current and we are not selling it as coverage.
03 — Why it varies
The unevenness is theirs, not ours.
Different speeds
A council that validates weekly and publishes on a Friday behaves very differently from one that publishes as it goes. Neither is doing anything wrong; both change what an alert can promise.
Different detail
Where a council publishes a floor area, a value estimate is built from the job in front of us. Where it does not, the estimate leans on category averages — and the confidence score on it says so.
04 — The list
Authority by authority.
Millions of live records sit behind this list. Figures refresh after ingest. We still grade each council on householder jobs a month, and how recently anything new arrived — not on how big the pile is.
269 authorities we can read, 220 with dated records, 77k householder planning jobs last year. Sold homes and poor EPCs sit on top of that (525k sales, 51k D–G certificates) — potential work that never appears on a planning register.
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Not sure about your own patch?
Send us the towns you cover. We will come back with what has actually been submitted, approved and cleared to start there over the last month, and tell you plainly if the answer is not enough to be worth £29.99. We would rather lose a subscription than have one cancelled in week three.