Provide your Planning application decision data
Follow this guidance when providing your Planning application decision data.
Providing planning data means making it available publicly to a standard so that services such as planning.data.gov.uk can find it, understand its quality, and trust it will be sustained.
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 application decision data
Take the following steps to provide your Planning application decision data:
- Prepare your data
- Check your data
- Publish your data
- Tell us about your data
- 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 may include any data you have provided in the past, along with information found on your website, or in other open data.
We will take the most recent data you provide as being more authoritative than any data we have collected from you previously, or found in other sources.
You can download tabular data we have for your organisation as a CSV file from the check and provide service and edit it using a spreadsheet or other CSV editors.
Similarly, you can download geospatial data we have for your organisation as CSV or GeoJSON from planning.data.gov.uk and modify it using QGIS or other GIS tools.
Your data does not need to be complete or perfect to start with. For many purposes having some data is better than no data, so start by providing the Planning application decisions information you have, and continue to iterate and improve it over time.
Files
For Planning application decisions you need to provide 3 datasets:
Each each dataset needs to be provided in a separate CSV file following the government tabular data standard.
Where your dataset contains geospatial fields, you may use one of the following formats:
- CSV
- GeoJSON
- GML
- KML
- Geopackage
The fields and format of the data you need to prepare are documented below, and formally defined in the technical specifications attached to this page.
Field names
You can use uppercase or lowercase names for your fields, and any punctuation characters are ignored,
meaning the following examples are all valid ways of naming the start-date field in your data:
StartDateStart DateSTART_DATEstart.date
Reference values
Each dataset has a reference field.
Reference values are important to help people find and link to the data.
Where you don’t have a reference for an item, you will need to create one that is:
- unique within your data
- persistent — it doesn’t change when the data is updated
A good reference is something you already use. Where these aren't unique, you make them unique by appending the year, or even the full date. Great references are short, easy to read, to pronounce and remember.
Date values
All dates must be in the format YYYY-MM-DD, following 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:
2025-04-192025-042025
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.
Planning application dataset
The Planning application dataset contains the following fields:
reference
Enter reference to help people find and link to the data. If you don’t have a reference for this item, you will need to create one that is:
- unique within your data
- persistent — it doesn’t change when the data is updated
A good reference is something you already use. Where these aren't unique, you make them unique by appending the year, or even the full date. Great references are short, easy to read, to pronounce and remember.
name
description
address-text
uprn
geometry
The boundary may be a single polygon, or a multipolygon value. All points should be in the WGS84 coordinate reference system. You may provide data containing points in another coordinate reference system, such as British National Grid, but they will need to be transformed into WGS84 by software such as the Planning Data platform and this transformation may lead to a small loss of accuracy. Geometry data provided in a CSV file should use the well-known text (WKT) representation for the field. If you're providing geometry in a GeoJSON, GML, Geopackage or KML, use the appropriate representation for the file format.
point
documentation-url
planning-application-type
planning-decision
planning-decision-type
notes
Enter any notes or commentary which helps you or others understand how this data was made, or how it may be interpreted.
organisation
Enter a CURIE value for the organisation from this list.
entry-date
Enter the date this data was created or modified.
start-date
decision-date
end-date
Planning application log dataset
The Planning application log dataset contains the following fields:
reference
Enter reference to help people find and link to the data. If you don’t have a reference for this item, you will need to create one that is:
- unique within your data
- persistent — it doesn’t change when the data is updated
A good reference is something you already use. Where these aren't unique, you make them unique by appending the year, or even the full date. Great references are short, easy to read, to pronounce and remember.
planning-application
planning-application-status
documentation-url
document-url
notes
Enter any notes or commentary which helps you or others understand how this data was made, or how it may be interpreted.
organisation
Enter a CURIE value for the organisation from this list.
event-date
entry-date
Enter the date this data was created or modified.
start-date
end-date
Planning application document dataset
The Planning application document dataset contains the following fields:
reference
Enter reference to help people find and link to the data. If you don’t have a reference for this item, you will need to create one that is:
- unique within your data
- persistent — it doesn’t change when the data is updated
A good reference is something you already use. Where these aren't unique, you make them unique by appending the year, or even the full date. Great references are short, easy to read, to pronounce and remember.
name
description
planning-application
document-type
documentation-url
document-url
notes
Enter any notes or commentary which helps you or others understand how this data was made, or how it may be interpreted.
organisation
Enter a CURIE value for the organisation from this list.
entry-date
Enter the date this data was created or modified.
start-date
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
Publish your data at a public endpoint, in a way in which anyone can download and use it.
The endpoint is a URL from which the data can be downloaded. This can be a single file hosted on your website. Or, you can serve your data using an OGC WFS or other API using a third-party service such as GitHub or 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, tell us about it so we can index and quickly make it available nationally on planning.data.gov.uk.
Use the check and provide service to tell us where it is.
You will need to provide for each dataset:
- the source webpage URL where the information in the data is presented on your website
- the endpoint URL from which the data can be collected
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 feedback from the the service to ensure your data meets the specification.
You also need to update and republish your data whenever there's a change to your Planning application decisions information.
We look for changes to the data at all of the endpoint URLs we know about every night, so we can quickly update planning.data.gov.uk.
It is simpler if you 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
If you need any help at any stage of the process, let us know by emailing digitalland@communities.gov.uk and a member of our team will be in touch.
You can participate in improving the design of this data, and help ensure planning data meets your needs at design.planning.data.gov.uk.