Freedom of information and planning: what a council discloses

A freedom of information request about a planning application is usually not a freedom of information request at all. Planning information is almost always environmental information, so it falls under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 rather than the Freedom of Information Act 2000, and that works in your favour. The Regulations apply a presumption in favour of disclosure, have no absolute exemptions, and subject every exception to a public interest test. A council that answers your planning request under the wrong regime has given itself more room than the law allows.

Before you make any request, though, check what is already on the file. Most of what people ask for is published.

What is already public without a request

Every local planning authority has to keep a register of applications under the Development Management Procedure Order 2015, and in practice almost all of them publish the application file online.

Expect to find the application forms, the drawings, the supporting reports, the consultation responses from statutory consultees and neighbours, the officer report, the decision notice and the conditions. Personal data is redacted, which means signatures, telephone numbers, email addresses and sometimes names of individual objectors, and that redaction is required by the data protection legislation rather than discretionary.

Committee material comes under a different and older right. Sections 100A to 100K of the Local Government Act 1972 give a right to inspect agendas, reports and the background papers on which a report is based, and agendas and reports must be published five clear days before the meeting. Background papers are the ones people forget to ask for. If an officer report relies on a consultant's note, a viability review or a highway assessment that is not on the planning file, that document is a background paper and the right to see it does not depend on making an information request at all.

Where a request is actually needed

Four categories of planning information routinely sit outside what is published.

Internal correspondence between officers, and between officers and the applicant, including pre-application discussions. Pre-application advice is the big one, because many authorities treat the whole pre-application file as confidential by default and then have to justify that position when asked.

Viability appraisals and the authority's review of them, where these have not been published. The Planning Practice Guidance is clear that viability assessments should be prepared on the basis that they will be made publicly available other than in exceptional circumstances, and that expectation has been enforced through the information rights system repeatedly. If an appraisal supporting a reduced affordable housing offer is not on the file, ask for it, and expect to get it. What the document should contain in the first place is set out on the viability assessment page.

Enforcement files, where the authority will usually resist disclosure while an investigation is live but has far less justification once it is closed. How those investigations are prioritised is covered in the look at council enforcement priorities and how complaints work.

And financial records about contributions: what was collected, what was spent and what remains. Much of this is now published annually in the infrastructure funding statement, as set out in the note on infrastructure funding statements and where the money went, so read that first and ask only for the gaps.

Which regime applies, and why it matters

Environmental information is defined broadly and covers information on the state of the environment, on factors and measures affecting it, and on plans, policies and activities likely to affect it. Planning decisions, policies, applications, appraisals and enforcement all fall inside that definition without much difficulty.

The practical differences between the two regimes are worth knowing before you write.

You do not have to name the regime. The authority has a duty to apply the correct one, and the Information Commissioner takes a dim view of authorities that handle environmental information under the wrong regime. But saying in your request that you consider the information to be environmental information under the 2004 Regulations removes an easy excuse.

The exceptions councils rely on

Five exceptions do almost all the work in planning cases, and each has a known weakness.

Material in the course of completion, or unfinished documents and incomplete data. Councils use this for draft reports and draft policy work. Its weakness is that it stops applying once the document is finished, so a refusal on this ground should be revisited after the decision is issued.

Internal communications. This covers officer-to-officer email and is widely used. It is still subject to the public interest test, and the public interest in understanding how a controversial decision was reached is frequently found to outweigh it, particularly after the decision.

Commercial confidentiality. This is the one used against viability requests. It requires confidentiality to be provided by law to protect a legitimate economic interest, and a generalised claim that an appraisal is commercially sensitive does not meet that. The guidance expectation of publication cuts directly against it.

Legal professional privilege and the course of justice. Strong where live litigation or an appeal is in prospect, much weaker once concluded.

Personal data. Properly applied to names, addresses, signatures and contact details of private individuals. Not properly applied to the names of officers acting in a professional capacity, or to the content of an objection with the identifying details removed.

A refusal has to tell you which exception is relied on and why, and has to explain the public interest balance. A refusal that just cites a regulation number is defective and worth challenging on that basis alone.

Timescales, internal review and the Commissioner

The response period is 20 working days under both regimes. The Regulations allow an extension to 40 working days where a request is complex and voluminous, and the authority has to tell you it is extending and why within the first 20.

If you are refused, or you get silence, the next step is an internal review. Ask for it in writing, say what you are challenging and why, and point to the public interest arguments the refusal did not address. The Information Commissioner expects internal reviews to be dealt with within 20 working days and in no case more than 40.

After the internal review, complain to the Information Commissioner. The Commissioner can issue a decision notice requiring disclosure, and either side can appeal that notice to the First-tier Tribunal. The process is free, and it is slow: expect months rather than weeks, which is why an information request is a poor tool for influencing a decision that will be made in eight weeks.

That timing point matters more than any other. If you need a document to inform an objection, ask for it as soon as the application is validated, and ask the case officer directly first. Officers will often just send it.

Charges and what can be refused

Under the Freedom of Information Act an authority can refuse a request where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit set by the fees regulations, calculated from staff time at a prescribed hourly rate. That is a refusal, not a bill.

The Environmental Information Regulations have no equivalent cost ceiling. They allow an authority to charge a reasonable amount for making information available, but they expressly prohibit a charge for allowing access to a public register or for examining information in situ at the authority's offices. So asking to inspect documents in person, rather than asking for copies, sidesteps the charging question entirely, and it is an underused right.

Burdensome requests can still be refused as manifestly unreasonable, and repeated or abusive requests can be refused as vexatious. Both are narrower than authorities sometimes suggest, and both require the authority to explain its reasoning.

Framing a request that works

A request that gets answered properly looks like this.

1. Identify the application by reference number and site address, or the policy document by name and date.
2. Ask for documents, not answers. A request for information is not a right to have questions answered, and an authority can legitimately say it holds no document that answers your question.
3. Be specific about document types: officer file notes, email correspondence between named roles, the pre-application advice letter, the viability appraisal and any review of it, the highway authority's internal consultation response.
4. Give a date range. An open-ended request invites a manifestly unreasonable refusal.
5. Ask first for a schedule of the documents held, then for the documents themselves. A schedule costs the authority little to produce and it tells you what to ask for.
6. Say that you consider the information to be environmental information under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, and ask for the request to be handled accordingly.
7. Offer to inspect in person as an alternative to receiving copies.

Then keep a record of the date you sent it. Almost every successful complaint to the Commissioner turns on dates, and almost every unsuccessful one turns on a request that was too vague to answer.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. Section 106 monitoring arrangements are a common subject of these requests, and what those fees cover is set out in the note on section 106 monitoring fees. If you are the applicant rather than the neighbour, you can start from a postcode to see which documents a site is likely to need.