Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far
A data scraping project has successfully collected 2.6 million planning decisions from 241 UK councils. The project faced challenges due to the varied configurations of council portals and restrictions on scraping. Findings reveal that the national approval rate for applications is around 88%, but many councils are missing the statutory decision timeframes.
- ▪The scraping project covered 241 councils across England, Scotland, and Wales.
- ▪36.5% of home extension applications missed the statutory 8-week target in 2025, an increase from 27.9% in 2019.
- ▪Guildford had the highest rate of delayed decisions, with 66% of applications exceeding the target timeframe.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931470 |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:34:03 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T07:55:53.258Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T07:55:53.258Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | VMCCKWJNXZhC |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I've been scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so farUK planning data is technically public. In practice it's locked behind 400+ different council portals, some still running bespoke ASP.NET that looks like it dates from 2004, some behind AWS WAF, all with subtly different schemas. I've spent four months scraping them. I'm now at 241 councils and 2.6 million decisions across England, Scotland and Wales.The scraping problemMost UK councils run one of a handful of portal systems, Idox being the most common. In theory this makes things easy.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.