Honest register
What we do not have.
Most data companies publish a coverage page listing what they cover. This one is mostly about the holes, because those are the part that can hurt you, and because a page that only lists strengths is an advertisement rather than a register.
Authorities
Counted live, from the same table the map reads
- Live planning authorities
- 378Every one has a public profile page.
- Abolished authorities kept for history
- 29Their applications and decisions are still real. The rows are kept, excluded from the directory, and their pages redirect to the successor authority.
- With an adopted plan recorded
- 67Where a plan name or adoption year is missing, the council page says so rather than leaving the field blank and hoping.
- Charging the levy
- 115Zone geometry is held for some but not all of these. Where it is missing, the charging area is reported as unknown rather than assumed.
Known gaps
Where it is thin, and why
01
Validation checklists reach about seven English councils in ten
Where we hold an authority's own published list, the submission checklist is built from it. Where we do not, the page says so and points at where the council publishes it. It never shows a national template dressed up as your council's requirements.
02
Some ingested checklists came from drafts
A number of authorities publish consultation drafts more prominently than adopted lists, and some of what was ingested came from those. Each requirement records the quality of its own source, so a draft-sourced requirement is visibly a draft-sourced requirement rather than averaged into the rest.
03
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are partly covered
The extraction is built and has run for only a small number of devolved authorities. A handful of councils block our reader outright at the network level, which is a decision on their side and not a misconfiguration on ours.
04
Quarterly statistics do not yet overlay the master record
The design has a quarterly figure overlaying the headline where a fresher quarter exists. Nothing populates it, so the figures come from the master record. It is not wrong, it is simply not as fresh as it was meant to be.
05
Address precision is currently degraded
Our Ordnance Survey Places entitlement returns an authorisation error, so every address lookup falls back to postcode centroids rather than rooftop positions. That affects address search, comparables placement, title search, and the check that compares your typed address to your drawn boundary.
06
Levy zone geometry is partial
Where an authority charges different rates by zone and we do not hold the zone boundaries, the charging area is reported as unknown and the drafter is forbidden from filling it in. In Westminster the small-scale affordable housing rate differs by a factor of 2.6 between areas, so an assumed zone is a six-figure error rather than a rounding one. A site straddling two zones has no single correct rate, and an explicitly typed answer is never overridden by a guess.
07
Tree preservation order coverage depends on the council
Many authorities do not publish their orders as data. An absence of a tree preservation order on the map is not evidence there is no protected tree on the site, and the layer panel says so.
08
Case law before roughly 2001 is not indexed
So an older authority cannot be verified, and is therefore not cited at all rather than cited on trust.
Not wired
6 declared layers that are not yet wired
Out of 81 in the catalogue. Each says so on the layer panel with its own reason, rather than being quietly hidden. A toggle that does nothing is worse than a toggle that is not there.
Planning history
LPA-by-LPA archive ingestion.
Pre-application advice
Coverage is patchy; ingestion in progress.
Title boundaries (INSPIRE)
Superseded by inspire_titles. Live HMLR INSPIRE WFS is per-LPA and returns BNG (EPSG:27700) features needing server-side reprojection, so Wren ingests them once per LPA instead - use the `Title polygons (live)` layer.
Price Paid
Superseded by residential_sales (Comparables group) - same Price Paid dataset, banded by price via the ppd_comparables bbox RPC.
Commercial comparables
VOA + private feed ingestion.
Rental comparables
Listings ingestion under review.
Why
The alternative is what the rest of this market does. One competitor publishes a fee table for 300 councils presented as current. The figures are the December 2023 schedule. A householder application in England has cost £548 since 1 April 2026, and that page still says £258.
Nobody reading it would know. That is the failure mode this page exists to avoid, and it is why every gap above is written down rather than smoothed over.
If you find something here that is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it and say when.
Start here
Check your own council's page.
Every field it does not hold says so. That is the same discipline as this page, applied one authority at a time.