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

Re:Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions... by simonjuk on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:34AM (#47931861)

I work with public data, and I'd love to get access to this data, but I suspect that although you have scraped the data from public websites, there are licensing and copyright implications for actually using it.

See also the open addresses project by Data Adaptive [1] which is using Freedom of Information requests to publish public council tax address data. The problem they have run into there is that their address datasets are derived from proprietary Ordnance Survey data.

It looks like data.gov.uk is in the process of standardising the planning application process, and publishing them under OGL [2].

[1]: https://www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-addr44.htm [2]: https://www.planning.data.gov.uk/dataset/planning-applicatio...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions... by mebkorea on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:44AM (#47931924)

Thanks and yeah, some of my boundary data (for the choropleth) comes from ONS open boundary files which I think are OGL but I'd need to check the chain of derivation. On the data.gov.uk standardisation, I've seen it but last I looked it was policy and boundaries, not actual decisions. Has that changed? If they're publishing decisions under OGL I'd gladly ditch the scraping for a proper feed. On licensing more generally... I haven't fully nailed it down. Showing aggregates and pointing back to source, but yeah there's a gap between data is public and do whatever you want with it commercially.

[ Parent | on HN ]