England has some of the most detailed planning records in the world. The problem is not the data. The problem is its inconsistency, its fragmentation, and the vast gaps between what is held and what is published.
The National Planning Data Platform
In 2019, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government launched planning.data.gov.uk — a national platform designed to aggregate planning data from local authorities across England into a single, machine-readable source. The ambition was significant: a single place where developers, planners, conveyancers, and technology platforms could access reliable, up-to-date planning data without needing to contact 317 separate local planning authorities.
By 2026, the platform holds data on conservation areas, listed buildings, flood zones, Article 4 Directions, brownfield land registers, development plan documents, and more. For many councils, the data is comprehensive and current. For others, it is incomplete, outdated, or entirely absent.
The Brownfield Register Gap
The Brownfield Land Register, introduced under the Housing and Planning Act 2016, requires every local planning authority to publish a register of brownfield sites suitable for residential development. The register is split into two parts: Part 1, which lists sites granted permission for development, and Part 2, which identifies sites suitable for development but not yet permissioned.
Part 1 compliance is reasonably consistent across English councils. Part 2 is a different story. The majority of local authorities publish no Part 2 entries at all. The reasons vary: resource constraints, lack of staffing capacity, limited political appetite, and the active assessment work required to identify and evaluate sites for Part 2.
The result is a national brownfield dataset that represents only a fraction of England's actual brownfield opportunity. Developers and planners relying on the register alone will systematically miss sites that local authorities have not got around to — or chosen not to — publish.
Council Mergers and Data Loss
The wave of local government reorganisation that has reshaped English councils since 2019 has created a new category of data risk: information that existed under predecessor councils but was never migrated to successor authorities.
When district councils are absorbed into unitary authorities, their websites are typically taken down within months. Planning records held on those websites — committee minutes, historic decisions, policy documents, conservation area appraisals, Article 4 Directions — disappear with them. Some is archived. Much is not.
The result is that planning data that was publicly accessible one month becomes effectively lost the next — not because the records were destroyed, but because nobody migrated them to the successor authority's digital presence.
What This Means for Property Professionals
For solicitors, surveyors, developers, and planning consultants, the inconsistency of planning data creates material risk. A search of publicly available data that returns no results is not the same as confirmation that no restrictions exist. It may simply mean the relevant authority has not published what it holds.
Professionals who treat an absence of results as confirmation of an absence of restrictions are exposed. The correct approach is to treat incomplete data as a signal to investigate further — through formal EIR requests, Local Land Charges searches, or direct enquiry to the relevant authority — rather than as a clean bill of health.
Technology platforms that aggregate planning data have a responsibility to be transparent about their data sources and coverage. At LandLens®, every constraint check identifies the data source for each layer and flags where known gaps exist — so that a clean result means what it says, and a data gap is identified as such rather than presented as a negative result.