About PlanIndex

PlanIndex is a public index of UK planning applications. We take the records councils already publish and give each one a permanent, readable page: the reference, the address, what is proposed, the dates, and the decision. You can look an application up by its reference, browse a council's activity, or get an email when something new is submitted near you.

Why it exists

Council planning portals are built for case officers, not for the public. They expire your session, hide records behind search forms, and rarely appear in a normal web search. So a neighbour notification letter arrives with a reference on it, you type that reference into a search engine, and nothing useful comes back.

We fill that gap. Every application we hold sits at a stable web address with its facts laid out plainly, and links back to the council's own portal for the plans and drawings. If you have a reference from a letter, you can find the application and understand it in a few seconds.

Where the data comes from

We draw on published planning registers, chiefly through planning.data.gov.uk and PlanIt. Both make application metadata available in a standard form. We record where every record came from and when we last saw it, and we credit those sources wherever their data appears.

We index the facts of an application, not the documents. Plans, elevations and officer reports stay on the council portal, which remains the authoritative record. Coverage grows council by council, and a council hub tells you honestly how far back our data for that authority runs.

Privacy

Planning data is public, but we are careful with it. We never show personal applicant names on a page, even when a source includes one. Company and agent names are fine. If you find personal information here that should not be public, you can ask us to remove it and we will review every request.