Using the planning register to find comparable decisions

Searching a council's planning register for comparable planning decisions is the cheapest evidence you will ever gather, and most people do it badly by searching the address instead of the development. The register itself is a statutory document: section 69 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 requires every local planning authority to keep a register of applications, and the Development Management Procedure Order 2015 sets out what has to be in it. Every authority now publishes it online, with a keyword search, a date filter and a decision filter.

Used properly it tells you what the authority has actually accepted, in its own words, on sites like yours.

Framing the search before you start

Write the proposition you are trying to prove before you open the search page. "Two-storey side extensions on semi-detached houses in this ward have been approved with a first-floor set-back of one metre" is a proposition. "Find something similar" is not.

A usable proposition names the development type, the physical characteristic in dispute, the geographic area and the period. Then it is testable, and the negative results are as useful as the positive ones.

Set the period deliberately. Decisions made under a superseded local plan carry less weight, so a search running back to 2010 will produce material an officer can dismiss in one line. Three to five years under the current adopted plan is usually the right window, extended only where the point is rare.

Searching by development type rather than address

Most registers search the development description field, which is free text written by the applicant or the validation officer. That is both the opportunity and the problem, because the same works get described five different ways.

Run several searches with different vocabulary for the same thing. For a rear extension try "rear extension", "single storey rear", "single-storey rear" and "erection of a rear". For a conversion try "conversion", "change of use" and the use class letters. Search the application type code as well, because most registers let you filter to householder, full, outline, prior approval or listed building consent, and that immediately removes the noise.

Where the register allows a ward or parish filter, use it in preference to a radius search. Character areas follow ward and parish boundaries more often than they follow distance.

Filtering by decision and by date

Two filters do most of the work: decision, and decision date. Filter to approvals when you are building a case that something is acceptable, and then run the same search filtered to refusals, because the refusals are what the officer will cite back at you.

Pay attention to the decision level. A delegated approval by a case officer is evidence of what the authority's professional staff accept. A committee approval against an officer recommendation is evidence of something different and carries less weight as a statement of the authority's position. Both are worth recording, and the difference is worth stating.

Withdrawn applications are quietly informative. A cluster of withdrawals for one type of development in one area usually means officers were advising refusal, and it is worth reading any pre-application correspondence that made it onto the file.

Reading the officer report rather than the notice

The decision notice tells you the outcome and the conditions. The officer report tells you why, and the why is the part you can use.

Read for the main issues the officer identified, the policies applied, the assessment of each issue, and the balancing paragraph at the end. Lift the officer's own formulation of the test where it helps you, because an argument expressed in the authority's own language is harder to reject than one expressed in yours.

Also read the consultation responses. The highway authority's standard wording on visibility, the conservation officer's view on a materials palette, the drainage consultee's position on discharge rates: these are the internal standards the authority applies, and they are rarely written down anywhere else. Where a comparable turns on heritage, note how the Heritage Statement submitted with it was treated, and whether the officer relied on it or went behind it.

The weight a comparable decision actually carries

Consistency is a material consideration, but it is not a rule. The courts have accepted that like cases should generally be decided alike, and that a decision maker departing from an earlier decision on a materially similar case should explain why. North Wiltshire District Council v Secretary of State for the Environment (1992) is the usual authority for that proposition in the appeal context.

What it does not give you is a right to the same answer. Every application is determined on its own merits under section 70(2), the site is different, the plan may have moved on, and the earlier decision may simply have been wrong.

So pitch the argument at the right level. A comparable shows that a particular design response has been found acceptable in this area under this plan, which puts the burden on the authority to identify what is different about your site. That is a strong position. Claiming an entitlement is a weak one, and officers respond badly to it.

Recording comparables for an appeal statement

Build a table as you go rather than a folder of screenshots. For each comparable record the application reference, the address, the date of decision, the decision route, the description of development, the relevant physical dimension, the policy relied on, and a one-line note on why it is comparable.

Download the PDFs at the time you find them. Council registers migrate between systems, links break, and an appeal statement that cites a reference nobody can retrieve is worse than one that cites nothing.

For the appeal itself, put the table in the body of the statement and the decision notices and officer reports in an appendix, cross-referenced. Inspectors read the table. They read the appendix only when the table makes them want to. If you are also looking for how inspectors have treated an issue, the Inspectorate publishes its decisions separately, and the planning law timeline is a reasonable place to keep track of policy changes that might have overtaken an older decision.

Comparables that undermine your own case

Search for the decisions that hurt you, and do it early.

Two reasons. The officer will find them, and finding them first lets you deal with them on your terms. And a statement that acknowledges an unhelpful refusal and distinguishes it on stated facts reads as professional, while a statement that omits it reads as selective once the omission is exposed.

Distinguish on the record, not on assertion. The refused scheme was 4.5 metres deep against your 3 metres. It adjoined a listed building and yours does not. It was determined before the current plan was adopted. Each of those is checkable, and each is worth a sentence.

Where you cannot distinguish an unhelpful decision, say so and argue the merits instead. Pretending it does not exist is how a case that was winnable becomes an argument about your credibility. Set the whole analysis out in the Planning Statement rather than leaving it in a covering letter.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

Once you know what the authority accepts, browse the report types on PlanScope to scope the evidence your own application needs. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.