Council intelligence
Councils are not interchangeable.
The same scheme, on the same kind of site, gets a different answer in two neighbouring authorities. So we hold a profile for every one of them, and we publish it free.
- Live authorities with a profile
- 378Live authorities with a profile
- Authority records held, including abolished
- 407Authority records held, including abolished
- Abolished districts kept for history
- 29Abolished districts kept for history
- To read any of them
- £0To read any of them
Why it matters
The plan that decides your application is local.
National policy sets the frame, but the document an officer actually decides against is the adopted local plan for that authority, and it is different everywhere.
A re-adopted plan also renumbers its policies. A statement citing the old numbering after a re-adoption is quoting a document that no longer exists, which is exactly the sort of error that gets an application queried at validation and costs a month.
What each profile holds
Enough to decide whether to apply.
- Approval rate
- How often they say yes
- Computed from the applications they have determined, not from a claim they make about themselves.
- Decision times
- How long they actually take
- Against the statutory target, so you can see how far past it they typically run.
- Adopted plan
- The document that decides it
- With its adoption date, so you know whether the numbering is current.
- Levy rate
- What the infrastructure charge is
- Community Infrastructure Levy where the authority charges it, by zone and by use.
- Validation list
- What they insist on
- That authority's own published requirements, which is where most procedural refusals start.
- Recent decisions
- What they have just decided
- Applications determined recently, with outcome and duration, near any site you name.
Honest about gaps
Where a profile is thin, it says so.
Not every authority publishes machine-readable data, and a few actively block automated access. Rather than fill those gaps with something plausible, the profile marks them as unknown.
| Held for every authority | Source |
|---|---|
| Boundary and identifiers | ONS |
| Applications and decisions | planning.data.gov.uk |
| Adopted plan and policies | The authority |
| Validation requirements | The authority |
| Levy rates | The authority |
Look yours up. It is free and there is no account.
Every one of the 378 live authorities has a page, indexed and readable without signing in.