Legal, data sources and takedown

Where the data comes from

Planning Archive copies the statutory planning register that every local planning authority in England must keep under section 69 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. We read it from two licensed public sources: the Greater London Authority’s Planning London Datahub and the public JSON API of the Back-Office Planning System used by councils in the Open Digital Planning register. Both are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Every record links to the council’s own page, which is the authoritative version. Councils correct and remove entries; where our copy disagrees with the council, the council is right.

How we crawl

Our crawler identifies itself with a User-Agent that includes this page and a contact address, honours robots.txt, waits at least two seconds between requests to one host, never bypasses a block, CAPTCHA or login, and stops when a council asks. We store register metadata only. Drawings, forms and statements stay on the council’s site; we link to them and never copy them (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 s.47 permits inspection, not republication).

Personal data

Planning registers include the names of applicants and agents and the address of the site. We hold only what the register publishes, never phone numbers, email addresses, signatures or the names of people who commented. Our lawful basis is legitimate interest in making a public statutory register searchable and watchable; we do not sell or bulk-export personal fields, and applicant names are not included in the API or in alerts.

Corrections and takedown

If you are named on an application and want your name removed from our copy, or if a council believes a record should not be shown, email hello@planningarchive.co.uk with the council and reference. We remove or redact within five working days and confirm by email. Councils that would rather supply a feed than be crawled are welcome to say so.

Model-extracted fields

Some fields are read from unstructured text (the description, a decision notice) by a language model. These are marked as extracted, show the quoted passage they rest on and a confidence, and are flagged when the quote cannot be found in the source. They never overwrite a register field.

No advice

Planning Archive is not a council and does not give planning advice, accept applications or comments, or guarantee the accuracy or completeness of any record.