Data sources

Where it comes from

Local planning authority registers, which are public records that councils are required to maintain and publish. We read them through published data feeds and aggregators rather than by scraping portals, and we store the authority’s own reference and a link back to the source on every record.

What we add

The plain-English summary, the development type, the size band, and the impact tags are ours, not the council’s. They are produced by a fixed set of rules applied to the published description, not by a language model, so the same wording always produces the same result and we can explain exactly why any record was classified as it was.

We do not alter the description, reference, address, or dates a council published. Where we could not determine something, we say so rather than guessing.

How often it refreshes

Continuously, within the limits of how often the sources themselves update, which is typically daily. An application can therefore exist on a council’s own register for up to a day before it reaches us.

Corrections and takedown

If a record is wrong, out of date, or should not be published, contact us with the reference and we will investigate. Where a council has corrected or removed a record at source, our next refresh will pick that up; where it has not, we will act on a well-founded request directly.