The landscape
UK planning application data is generated by ~380 local planning authorities (LPAs). Every authority is required to publish applications publicly under the Town and Country Planning Act. In practice, "publicly published" means "on their council website" — not necessarily in a machine-readable, centralised format.
The government has been working to change this. Several initiatives have tried to aggregate planning data centrally, with varying degrees of success.
Free sources
The DLUHC (now MHCLG) Open Data Platform — the closest thing to an official centralised planning API. It provides a REST API for querying planning applications and related datasets (conservation areas, listed buildings, flood risk, tree preservation orders, and more).
What it covers:- Entity-based queries for planning applications, LPAs, and spatial datasets
- Coverage grows as councils submit data — currently partial
- Well-documented API at planning.data.gov.uk/docs
- Free with no rate limits published
- Incomplete coverage — not all councils submit data yet
- Limited filtering (no radius search, limited keyword search)
- No webhooks or alerting
- Data lag can be significant for some councils
Several councils and regional bodies publish bulk planning application datasets on data.gov.uk as CSV downloads. Coverage is inconsistent — some councils publish annually, some quarterly, some not at all.
What it covers:- Bulk CSV downloads (not a queryable API)
- Selected councils/regions only
- Historical data going back several years in some cases
- Not real-time — datasets updated infrequently
- No consistent schema across councils
- Not a queryable API
- Requires significant data cleaning
Every council publishes applications on their own portal. The data is all there — it's just fragmented across ~380 different websites running different software.
What it covers:- Complete data for each individual council
- Usually includes documents, conditions, and decision notices
- Near-real-time (submitted applications usually visible within 24–48 hours)
- No consistent API — requires scraping each council individually
- Portal software changes break scrapers
- CAPTCHAs and rate limiting on some portals
- Significant engineering effort to maintain at scale
The Royal Town Planning Institute runs a basic search API. It accepts GET requests and returns JSON. Documentation is sparse, coverage is unclear, and filtering is very limited.
Best for: Experimentation only. Not production-ready.PlanWire aggregates from planning.data.gov.uk and direct council scrapers into a single clean REST API. The free tier gives you 100 requests/day with no credit card required.
What you get free:- Search across 379 councils with keyword, status, council, postcode filtering
- Spatial search — radius queries by lat/lng
- Webhook setup (deliver on trigger)
- Full API documentation
When do you need a paid API?
The free sources above are sufficient for many use cases. You should consider a paid API when:
- You need complete UK coverage — planning.data.gov.uk coverage is partial and inconsistent
- You need real-time alerting — no free source offers webhooks
- You're making more than a few hundred queries per day — free tier limits kick in
- You need spatial search — radius queries aren't available from government sources
- You're building a commercial product — you need reliable uptime and support SLAs
The scraping option
Building your own scraper is viable but significantly underestimated work. The UK's main planning portal systems are:
- Idox (Public Access) — used by ~150+ councils
- Northgate (formerly Uniform) — used by ~100+ councils
- Ocella — smaller footprint, various councils
- Custom builds — several London boroughs and larger councils
Each system has different pagination, different field names, different CAPTCHA implementations, and different rate limiting behaviour. Maintaining scrapers for all 380 councils is an ongoing engineering burden — portals update, structures change, and scrapers break silently.
If you're building a commercial product, the ROI on a maintained API typically exceeds the cost of building and maintaining your own scraping infrastructure within the first few months.