April 28, 2026
Planning permission? Comment denied
Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far
One coder dug through millions of council records — and the comments instantly turned savage
TLDR: One developer gathered 2.6 million UK planning decisions from hundreds of hard-to-use council websites, exposing how messy and delayed the system has become. Commenters were split between praising the effort, roasting the site’s weak “mixed results” checker, and throwing out wild ideas for beating the blockers.
A lone builder of Planning Lens has spent four months wrestling hundreds of UK council planning websites and pulling together a giant stash of public decisions — 2.6 million of them. That’s the impressive bit. The delicious bit? The community immediately made it clear that the real planning battle may not be with town halls, but with users who are not impressed by vague results and paywalls.
The biggest gasp came from one brutally honest commenter who mocked the site’s postcode checker for basically saying “Mixed results” and not much else. Ouch. That sparked the thread’s core drama: is this a heroic public-interest data project, or a promising tool with a product page that currently feels more like a teaser trailer than the movie? The creator says they’ve got zero paying customers so far, and commenters more or less replied: yes, we can see why.
But the crowd wasn’t just roasting. Some users jumped in with chaotic helpful energy, suggesting AI bots, browser-mimicking tools, and commercial partners to help break through stubborn council websites. There’s a kind of scrappy admiration running through the thread: people are fascinated that public records can be so public-yet-impossible to access. And the actual findings are eyebrow-raising too — approval rates are high overall, but delays are getting worse, with some areas missing the 8-week target at shocking levels. So yes, the data matters. But in true internet fashion, the comments turned it into a mini-drama about bad user experience, scraping wizardry, and whether “mixed results” is the most British answer possible.
Key Points
- •Scraped 241 UK council planning portals, aggregating 2.6 million planning decisions across England, Scotland, and Wales.
- •Multiple scraping approaches were used: requests-based, Playwright (browser automation), and curl_cffi for TLS fingerprinting.
- •Some portals block scraping via TLS fingerprinting, rate limits, legacy ASP.NET, and AWS WAF with JavaScript challenges; Liverpool remains difficult to scrape.
- •National planning approval rate is about 88%, with large variations at ward level within councils.
- •Across 119 English and Welsh councils, 36.5% of home extension applications missed the 8-week target in 2025 (up from 27.9% in 2019); Guildford had 66% over-target and 13.3 weeks average.