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England only

We cover all of England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different planning systems and aren’t covered yet. A search outside England tells you so.

What every field gets

Every field in England is checked against the same national data:
  • protected wildlife sites, ancient woodland and battlefields
  • flood zones
  • Green Belt, National Parks and National Landscapes
  • farmland quality
  • how close it is to a town or village
  • road access
  • schools, GP surgeries and public transport
  • public rights of way
See Data sources for where each comes from.

What depends on the council

Some checks depend on what each council publishes. The first two find the strongest signs of development:
  • Local Plan allocations and sites put forward, from the council’s published plans and maps.
  • Planning applications on and near the field, from the council’s planning register.
  • The council’s housing supply and Local Plan age, from council statements and the Housing Delivery Test.
Within England we don’t yet read every council’s planning register. We read over 130 councils’ registers every day; for the rest, reports rely on national data. The councils pages list every planning authority in England, with the applications we hold, applications for new homes in the last year, its Local Plan sites and its housing land supply.
For today’s numbers (councils read, applications held, fields scored), see the public metrics.

Confidence

Every report says how confident its score is: high, medium or low. It lists each check and whether it was made.
We don’t yet hold the council’s Local Plan sites or its planning applications for that area. Without them the score may be missing something. The report says which checks it couldn’t make.
Some checks are partial or still under way: for example, we’re still reading back through a council’s register, or the deep report’s web check hasn’t been run.
Every check was made in full, including the web check.
The report’s Data and sources tab shows the checks one by one, and What we could not check lists the gaps.