Guidance

Publish your Development policy data

Working Draft

5 April 2023

This guidance is under development. Help us improve it and give your feedback by email.

Follow this guidance when providing your Development policy data.

There are currently no obligations on any party to provide data in conformance to this specification. A future version of this specification may be published on GOV.UK, and cited as one of a number of official data standards for the provision of planning data under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, other regulations, contracts, and agreements.

Providing planning data means making it available publicly to a standard, so that anyone using services such as planning.data.gov.uk can:

  • find it
  • understand its quality, meaning and purpose
  • trust it will be accurate and maintained

Providing your Development policy data

Take the following steps to provide your Development policy data:

  1. Prepare your data
  2. Check your data
  3. Publish your data
  4. Tell us about your data
  5. Keep your data up to date

Prepare your data

Start by reviewing any data we may already have about your organisation on planning.data.gov.uk using the check and provide service. This might include:

  • any data you have provided in the past
  • information found on your website
  • open data from other public sources

We treat the data you provide as being more authoritative than data we previously collected or that we find elsewhere.

You can download tabular data we have for your organisation as a CSV file from the check and provide service, then edit it using a spreadsheet or other CSV editors.

You can download geospatial data we have for your organisation as CSV or GeoJSON from planning.data.gov.uk, then modify it using QGIS or other GIS tools.

You must provide data for the mandatory fields identified.

Datasets

For Development policies you may provide the following dataset:

You need to provide each dataset in a separate CSV file and follow the government tabular data standard.

If your dataset contains geospatial fields, you may use one of the following formats:

  • CSV
  • GeoJSON
  • GML
  • KML
  • Geopackage

Field names

You can use a field name with uppercase, lowercase and any punctuation characters. For example, you can use any of the following names for the start-date field in your data

  • StartDate
  • Start Date
  • START_DATE
  • start.date

Reference values

Each dataset has a reference field. Reference values are important to help people find and link to your data. If you do not have a reference value for an item, you will need to create one that:

  • is unique within your data
  • does not change when the data is updated

A good reference is something you already use. If your reference is not unique, you can make them unique by adding the year or full date. Great references are:

  • short
  • easy to read
  • easy to pronounce and remember

Date values

All dates must be in the format YYYY-MM-DD as set out in the guidance for formatting dates and times in data.

Where you don't know the precise date you can enter just the month YYYY-MM or even just the year YYYY. The platform will default a start-date to the first of the month, or the first of January, and an end-date to the last day of the month, or the last day of December. For example:

  • 2025-04-19
  • 2025-04
  • 2025

Geometry and point fields

All coordinates in any geospatial data you provide must be in the WGS84 (ETRS89) coordinate reference system following the government guidance on the Exchange of a location point.

A geometry field may contain a single POLYGON or a MULTIPOLYGON object. A point field may only contain a single POINT object.

If you’re providing geospatial data in a CSV, the field must be encoded as well-known text (WKT), for example:

  • MULTIPOLYGON (((1.188829 51.23478,1.188376 51.234909,...
  • POLYGON ((1.188829 51.23478,1.188376 51.234909,...
  • POINT (-3.466788 50.58151)

When providing geospatial data as GeoJSON, GML, KML or in a Geopackage, use the native format for the geospatial data. That is there is no need to duplicate the geospatial data into a point or geometry property or field.

Development policy dataset

Development policy area dataset

Check your data

Use the check and provide service to review your data before you publish it. The service will show you how the data will appear on planning.data.gov.uk along with feedback on how you might improve your data.

Publish your data

Publishing your data consists of two parts:

  • An endpoint where the data can be downloaded from
  • A source webpage where the information contained in the data is presented on your website

Endpoint

Make your data available at a public endpoint. An endpoint is a URL from which anyone can download the data. This can be either:

  • a single file hosted on your website

  • a file hosted on another public website including GitHub

  • an Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service (OGC WFS)

  • an open application programming interface (API) such as ArcGIS

Ensure your endpoint URL is documented and linked to from a public webpage to help people easily find and download the data.

The documentation webpage for your endpoint should include a clear statement that the data is provided as open data under the Open Government Licence.

Source webpage

The source webpage is where a user can see the same information that is shown in the data. This is usually one of your existing planning policy pages on your official .gov.uk website.

It is important that the source webpage links to the endpoint documentation webpage to help users trust the authenticity of the data.

Tell us about your data

Once you have published the data, use the check and provide service to tell us where it is. This is so we can index the data and quickly make it available nationally on planning.data.gov.uk.

For each dataset, you will need to provide the:

  • source webpage URL where the information in the data is presented on your website
  • endpoint URL where you can collect the data

The service also asks for your name and email address as a point of contact in case of any issues.

Keep your data up to date

Continue to improve your data and act on the the service feedback to make sure that your data meets the specification.

We update planning.data.gov.uk with any changes to the data at all the endpoint URLs each day.

Publish your changes to the same endpoint URL. If you create a new endpoint you need to tell us about your data again.

Contact us

Email digitalland@communities.gov.uk to get help.

You can help improve the design of this and other planning data

at design.planning.data.gov.uk.

Technical specifications

Development policy technical specification (5 April 2023)

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