Guidance

Publish your sites data

The Town and Country Planning (XXXX) Regulations 2024 will require all local planning authorities to publish their sites data online, following nationally prescribed data standards. This guidance will help local planning authorities meet these statutory requirements ensuring their sites data will:

  • 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 the Digital Land team at MHCLG to begin building a national picture of local plans.

Make your sites data easy to find, use and trust

A list of potential development sites is one of the most important inputs in the production of Local Plans. It establishes the amount and location of land available for development, which in turn informs the amount and types of housing and employment space there is space for.

Local authorities are required to publish a list of all sites that are considered for development, regardless of where they come from, or their likelihood for development. This data needs to be published following a prescribed data standard set out below and kept up to date at least quarterly.

Depending how you currently store your sites data, you may be able to publish it as it is, but there are some minimum requirements as set out below:

  • Ensure your data follows the standards prescribed for the relevant data type (see ‘geographies data’ guidance below)
  • Publish your data online. This can be on your website or any cloud service you may use.
  • Submit a persistent web address (URL) of your data to digitalland@communities.gov.uk

If your site data is all contained within your GIS system, then please publish your data in accordance with our ‘geographies data’ guidance.

If you also have a spreadsheet with your sites information, you should publish your site boundaries as geography data along with the corresponding spreadsheet.

Sites data types

Sites information can be grouped according to the type of data it is. All sites data will be of one of the following types:

Geography data

This is all the geospatial information related to your sites that have been identified for development. Your geography data needs to be published according to the geography schema.

Publish your geographies as data

Document data (to be confirmed)

Metrics (to be confirmed)