How we compare
We publish what we cover, what we don't, and how fresh it is.
Most UK planning data products won't let you check their coverage without an account, won't tell you when each council was last scraped, and round their council count up to suspiciously convenient numbers. PlanNexus does all three the other way round.
Verifiable coverage
Our /coverage page lists every Local Planning Authority we index, with application count, last-scrape time and a 7-day activity sparkline — public, no signup needed.
We also publish our gap: every UK LPA we don't yet cover, by name and ONS GSS code, on the Coverage Roadmap. You can confirm whether the council you need is live or pending before signing up.
Honest counts
The UK has roughly 378 Local Planning Authorities — every English district, borough, unitary, London borough, plus Scotland's 32 council areas, Wales's 22, Northern Ireland's 11, the National Park Authorities and a handful of Development Corporations.
When you see a competitor advertise “400+ UK councils”, that count typically pads with geographic regions (“England” or “Yorkshire” listed as a council), Crown Dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man — not part of the UK), and the same physical council listed multiple times under different IDs.
Our number on the homepage is exactly what you see on /coverage, reconciled against planning.data.gov.uk. No padding.
Real freshness
Most planning data products refresh nightly — every council's data ages in lockstep, so the moment a new application is filed at noon you see it tomorrow morning at earliest.
PlanNexus scrapes every active council every few hours, on a staggered schedule. The Last Scrape column on /coverage shows when each council was actually checked — typically within the last 6 hours, often within the last hour.
Webhooks fire as soon as the scraper sees a new application, so your downstream system is on parity with what the council's own portal shows.
Why does the gap matter?
Coverage gaps are the silent killer of planning-data integrations. You buy a product based on “full UK coverage”, build a feature on top, then discover six weeks later that the three councils your customers actually care about return zero results, or are listed as “active” but haven't been scraped successfully in four months.
We'd rather you spotted that on day one and decided whether it's a deal-breaker. If a council you need is on our pending list, the existing “Request a council” form on /coverage usually moves it onto the live roster within days. If we're not the right fit, you keep the time you'd otherwise have spent integrating.
See for yourself
Two minutes on /coverage will tell you more about whether PlanNexus is right for you than any pricing page.