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June 2026 · Data

How to find planning applications in your area (free and paid)

Planning applications are public. Every proposal to build, extend, change the use of, or demolish a building in the UK is logged on a register that anyone can read, no account and no fee. The catch: the data is scattered across hundreds of separate council systems, each with its own search box and its own quirks, and no way to watch more than one area at a time. This guide covers every realistic way to find applications, what each route is good for, and how to choose between free lookups and a paid tool.

Route 1: your local council’s planning register (free)

Every local planning authority in the UK is required to keep a public register of the applications it receives and decides. In practice that means a search page on the council’s website, usually branded “Public Access”, “Planning Online”, or “Search planning applications”.

You can normally search by:

  • Address or postcode. The most common starting point.
  • Application reference number. Useful if you already have it from a site notice or a neighbour letter.
  • Date range. To see what’s come in recently.
  • Ward or parish. To scan a whole area.

Most councils also publish a weekly listof newly validated and recently decided applications (PDF or web page), which is the closest thing to an “what’s new this week” feed the free route offers.

Good for: a one-off check on a specific address or a single neighbourhood; reading the full documents (drawings, officer reports, conditions) on a decided application.

Where it falls down: you can only search one council at a time, the interfaces vary wildly, results are rarely filterable by the things a business cares about (project type, value, trade), and there are no automatic alerts. If your patch crosses two or three boundaries, and most trades’ patches do, you’re running the same search several times a week, by hand. You can see how that maps to real areas on our council pages, for example Glasgow and Lambeth, and the full list of councils we cover.

Route 2: the Planning Portal and national search tools (free)

The Planning Portal is the government-backed service most applicants use to submit applications, and it links through to local registers. The UK government’s own “Search for planning applications” guidance is the canonical pointer to the right council system for any address.

There are also free aggregators (for example PlanIt) that pull applications from many councils into one searchable index. These are useful for ad-hoc research across boundaries, though coverage, freshness and the depth of each record vary, and they’re built for searching rather than for monitoring a defined area over time.

Good for: finding the correct council system, occasional cross-boundary research, and understanding the application process itself.

Where it falls down: still fundamentally a search experience, not a monitoring one. No trade or value filtering, and no reliable way to be told when something relevant lands.

Route 3: paid planning-data tools (subscription)

Once finding applications becomes a recurring job, whether that is winning work, tracking competitors or watching a development pipeline, the manual routes stop scaling. Paid tools exist to solve that. They differ a lot in who they’re built for:

  • Construction project-lead platforms such as Glenigan and Barbour ABI focus on larger construction projects and contract pipelines, typically sales-led and priced for enterprise teams. (We compare the trade-off in detail on our SiteLens vs Glenigan page.)
  • Land and development tools focus on site sourcing, ownership and valuation, a different job from finding work in the supply chain.
  • SiteLens sits deliberately at the supply-chain end. It ingests applications across the councils we cover, classifies each one by trade, project type and likely value, and turns the register into a filtered, daily lead feed with alerts. It is self-serve, with transparent pricing.

Good for:anyone who needs ongoing coverage of more than one area, filtering by what’s actually relevant to them, and alerts rather than repeated manual searches.

Where it falls down:it’s a subscription. For a true one-off, such as checking a single address before you buy a house, the free council register is the right tool, and you shouldn’t pay for more.

How to search effectively, whichever route you use

A few habits make any of these routes more productive:

  • Start from the postcode, then widen. Search the exact address first, then step out to the street or ward to catch neighbouring proposals that may affect you.
  • Note the reference number. It’s the fastest way back to a record and the only reliable way to track an application through to decision.
  • Learn the application types. “Full”, “outline”, “reserved matters”, “householder”, “listed building” and “prior approval” mean very different things for how much work is involved and how likely it is to proceed. Our guide to planning application types breaks down what each one means for the trades.
  • Watch the validation date, not the submission date. Validation is the clock that matters, and the point at which an application becomes visible and open to comment.
  • Describe what you want in plain English. On SiteLens you can type something like “approved warehouse extensions near Manchester in the last 6 months” and it builds the filters for you, then classifies every application by trade, project type and value so you skip the noise.

How to compare councils (without trusting a single number)

A common follow-on question is which councils approve the most, or decide the fastest. Be careful with headline figures. Approval rates and decision times are published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government in its planning application statistics, but they mix application types, and a high approval rate can reflect a lot of straightforward householder applications. The honest way to compare is like-for-like, same application type and same period, rather than comparing one council’s overall rate to another’s. We walk through the method in council approval rates: how to compare councils. SiteLens Pro does this like-for-like comparison for you, with approval rate and median decision time broken down by council and application type, so you compare the same kind of scheme rather than one council’s headline rate against another’s.

Which route is right for you?

If you need to check one address once, use the council register. It’s free and authoritative. If you research across boundaries occasionally, the national tools and free aggregators will do. If finding applications is part of how you win or plan work, week in and week out, across several areas and filtered to what matters to your trade, that is the job SiteLens is built for, and you can try it without talking to anyone.

Try it free

Create a SiteLens Explorer account and search live applications across the councils we cover, no card required. Pro is £39/mo, or £29/mo billed annually, and adds the contact details, a Find contacts lookup, competitor alerts and analytics. Team is £99/mo, or £79/mo billed annually, and adds up to 5 users, hourly alerts and larger exports. No contract, cancel anytime. See pricing.

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