Planning data standards and the duty to publish

The Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 contains powers to require local planning authorities to handle planning data to approved standards and to publish it in those standards. As at 13 October 2026 those powers are being brought into effect through regulations and programme funding rather than all at once, so what you can rely on today is a mixture of genuine statutory duties, published specifications that councils follow voluntarily, and gaps.

For anyone doing feasibility work that matters more than it sounds. A constraint layer on a national platform is not the same thing as the council's legal record of a designation, and knowing which one you are looking at is the difference between a sound site appraisal and a surprise at validation.

What the Act does

Part 3 of the Act introduces planning data provisions that allow the Secretary of State to approve data standards for planning data in England and to require planning authorities to comply with them when processing and publishing that data. There are related powers about software and about the form in which information is provided.

These are enabling powers. They take effect through regulations, and the sequencing has been gradual. Treat any statement about what councils must publish as a statement that needs checking against the current commencement position, which is the same caution that applies to plan-making reform and emerging plans and to Schedule 3 and the sustainable drainage approving body.

The direction of travel is clear enough. Government policy is to move planning data from documents to datasets, so that a conservation area boundary, an Article 4 direction or a site allocation is a machine-readable geometry with an identifier rather than a line on a PDF map in an appendix.

What is already published, and under what duty

Several publication duties pre-date the 2023 Act and are live now.

Brownfield land registers are required under the Town and Country Planning (Brownfield Land Register) Regulations 2017, in a prescribed data standard, and have to be reviewed annually. Local planning authorities must keep a planning register under the Development Management Procedure Order 2015, which is why application data is public. Authorities must publish the statutory list entries that affect their area through the National Heritage List for England, maintained by Historic England. And the Environment Agency publishes flood zone data through the Flood Map for Planning.

Alongside those, the government's planning data platform publishes datasets contributed by authorities and national bodies: conservation areas, Article 4 directions, tree preservation orders, listed buildings, local plan boundaries, brownfield registers and more. Contribution to several of those datasets has been encouraged and funded rather than compelled, which explains the uneven coverage.

The honest summary is that the platform is excellent where a council has published and silent where it has not. Absence of a constraint on the platform is not evidence that the constraint does not exist.

The datasets that matter at feasibility stage

That third column is the point. For a designation, the legal record is the instrument that made it and the register the authority keeps, not a national aggregation of it. For a scheme where the designation is decisive, request the designation document itself and read the boundary description.

Where the data is wrong

Three failure modes recur, and they are worth knowing before you build a site appraisal on a map.

Geometry drift. A conservation area boundary digitised from a paper map at a coarse scale can sit several metres from where the written description puts it. On a site at the edge of a boundary, that is the whole question.

Staleness. Article 4 directions are made, varied and cancelled, and the published dataset reflects what the authority last submitted. A direction made last year may not be on the platform. A direction cancelled last year may still be.

Attribute gaps. A record can exist with no date, no reference and no link to the underlying document, which makes it impossible to verify. Those records are a prompt to ask the council, not an answer.

Where a published dataset and the council's own record conflict, the council's record wins for legal purposes, and you should say in your submission which source you used and when you checked it. Dating your constraint check costs nothing and settles arguments.

What changes for applicants as standards take effect

Four practical shifts are already visible on schemes going through better-resourced authorities.

Validation is becoming more data-driven, with local lists expressed as structured requirements rather than prose. Submitting the right documents is the same job as it ever was, though the checking of it is faster and less forgiving.

Constraint detection at the front of a project is getting faster and more reliable, which pushes the discovery of a problem earlier. That is a good thing for budgets and an uncomfortable one for optimistic site appraisals.

Policy references are becoming addressable. A policy with an identifier can be cited precisely, and officers increasingly expect that precision in a planning statement rather than a paraphrase.

Monitoring is getting easier for everyone, including objectors. Infrastructure funding statements, housing land supply positions and application outcomes are all easier to interrogate than they were, which raises the standard of the arguments you will meet.

None of that changes the legal tests. It changes how quickly everyone can see the facts.

Checking a constraint properly

1. Start with the national sources for flood risk, heritage listing and protected sites, because those are maintained by the body with the statutory function.
2. Check the planning data platform for the council-held designations, and note the dataset date.
3. Go to the council's own mapping and registers for anything decisive, and request the designating document where the boundary is close.
4. Record the source, the date and the version for every constraint you rely on, and put that record in the application documents.
5. Ask the council directly where the data is silent or contradictory, in writing, and keep the reply.

Step five is the one people skip. A planning officer confirming in an email that no Article 4 direction applies is not a Lawful Development Certificate, and it is still worth having on the file.

Where a reform is announced but not yet in force, say so in your submission with an as-at date rather than citing it as though it applies. The same discipline applies to levy changes and to commencement notices under the Community Infrastructure Levy amendment regulations, where getting the commencement position wrong has direct financial consequences. You can follow the reform items as they move on the PlanScope planning law timeline, which is the place we track updates.

As at 13 October 2026, the planning data provisions of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 are being implemented in stages and the commencement position should be verified on legislation.gov.uk and gov.uk before you rely on any particular duty. This is general guidance, not legal advice, so check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

PlanScope checks your site against flood, heritage and protected-site data automatically and flags where a report is likely to be needed: browse the 66 report types to see what a scheme at your address would require. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.