Guidance

Publish your local plan data

The Town and Country Planning (XXXX) Regulations 2024 will require all local planning authorities to publish their local plans in a digital format, following nationally prescribed data standards. This guidance will help local planning authorities meet these statutory requirements ensuring their local plans data can be:

  • published in a standardised structure and format
  • simplify the way the data can be kept up to date
  • enable the data to be easily found online for local authorities, policy makers, government and PropTech companies so they can use the data
  • help Digital Land at MHCLG to begin building a national picture of local plans

Make your Local Plan data easy to find, use and trust

Local plans are one of the most important types of information in the planning system. They are how developers and local communities can find out what can be built where. But for local plans to be useful, they must be easy to find, use, understand and trust. To achieve this, local authorities are required to publish their local plans online and to a standardised format.

This will also allow anyone to build a national picture of local plans, better undertake strategic and cross boundary planning, and ensure new digital services can be built using this data.

Publishing your local plan data can be done in 3 steps:

  1. Ensure your data follows the standards prescribed for the relevant data type (see below)
  2. Publish your data online. This can be on your website or any cloud service you may use
  3. Submit the URL of your data to: Digitalland@communities.gov.uk

Local Plan data types

Local Plan information can be grouped according to the type of data it is. All local plan data will be of one of the following types:

Geography data

This is all the geospatial information in your local plan. Amongst other things it will include your Local Plan boundary, all its spatial policies, specific points such as listed buildings and more. Your geography data needs to be published according to the geography schema..

Publish your geographies as data

Document data (to be confirmed)

Timetable data (to be confirmed)

Metric data (to be confirmed)