Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far

Re:Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions... by pbhjpbhj on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:12AM (#47931722)

Have you spoken to any planners, a quick search for similar applications in other LAs might be a useful thing for them.

There's a Royal Institute of Town Planners, they probably have a magazine you could advertise in (but equally that might get you blocked, idk).

RICS people could probably use the data too? I guess it's useful house-buyer info; houses in the vicinity had successful loft conversions, say.

On the data side - it's something of a moat for you now, but I could see you being successful with FOI requests. An MP might be interested in championing open data access.

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Re:Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions... by mebkorea on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:28AM (#47932214)

All good points. I've been so busy with the data collection and just "irl stuff" that I haven't spoken to planners directly which is an oversight on my part — they're the obvious power users. RTPI/RICS are both on my list but as I said, I've been focusing on data more than distribution. Probably the wrong order tbh. FOI is interesting, especially for the trickier portals (Liverpool's WAF, the dead-portal ones). It might be cleaner than scraping. MP/open-data angle is definitely something I hadn't seriously considered. Worth thinking about tho! Thanks.

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