No single register lists what every UK council decides. PlanningLens builds one, indexing every council portal that publishes across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, refreshed each night. The dataset is free to search, and the research below is drawn from it.
Article 4 directions stripping permitted development rights from small HMOs are spreading across England, borough by borough.
The statutory target is eight weeks. The national average is 9.4. Where the gap is widest, and what it costs.
England is deciding nearly twice as many HMO applications as four years ago, and refusing a sharply rising share of them.
How a cathedral city became one of the slowest places in England to extend a home.
A pre-registered, independent benchmark of the government’s £8.2M Augmented Planning Decisions pilot, published before the results were known.
Every figure on this site regenerates from council portal records. The tiers, the exclusions and the known gaps are published in full.
New research
The AI Planning Scorecard: tracking the £8.2M MHCLG / Google DeepMind pilot at Barnet, Camden and Dorset. Read the briefing →
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The council portal shows you applications, one at a time. PlanningLens shows you approvals: how projects like yours actually fared, ward by ward, and how long decisions really took. Same public records, added up into an answer.
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Comparable decisions, refusal reasons and portal records for one site, compiled into an appeal-ready pack.
See evidence packs →1,072,000+ decisions across all 33 boroughs. Your council gets the same treatment, whichever it is.
These are borough averages, your street could be very different. Check your postcode →
See what’s already been approved on your street, from 3,790,000+ real council decisions.
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Sample for Wakefield WF4. Enter your postcode above to see this for your street.
Built from the same public records the councils publish themselves, so our figures track the government’s own data. When we measured Canterbury’s householder decision times, we landed within two points of the official figure: 42% against 44%.
Which wards approve. Which refuse. Which design choices keep coming back. Free, property-specific PDF in your inbox in 2 minutes.
Real approval rates, refusal patterns and timelines for your project type.
305+ councils covering 83%+ of the UK population. The most searched:
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