Reading the planning list: finding jobs a year before they go out to tender

By the time you hear about the rear extension on the next street, three firms have already been round it with a tape. The architect has a shortlist, the client has a number in their head, and you are the fourth quote whose job is to make the second one look reasonable.

That job was public eleven months earlier. It went onto the council's planning register with a description of the work, a site address, a set of drawings, the name of the person paying for it and the name and practice of the agent who drew it. Nothing about that record is restricted, and it is the earliest public signal in the UK that money is about to be spent on a building.

This page is how that record works, which parts of it tell you when the job actually starts, and a weekly routine that takes about twenty minutes.

The register is statutory, and the weekly list is how you read it

Section 69 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 requires a local planning authority to keep a register of applications for planning permission and of how they were dealt with, and the section is blunt about access: the register "must be kept available for inspection by the public at all reasonable hours".

Article 40 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015 sets out what has to be in it, and it is more than a list of references. Part 1 holds pending applications, including copies of the applications with their plans and drawings and any planning obligation or section 278 highways agreement proposed or entered into. Part 2 holds the decided ones, including copies of the applications, the design and access statements, the fire statements, the authority's decision with its conditions and its date, and appeal decisions. Article 40 also allows an authority keeping the register electronically to make it available on its own website, which is why the counter at the town hall stopped being the way anybody does this.

In practice that website is a Public Access portal, and it carries two lists that update once a week:

• Applications validated in this week. Somebody has paid the fee and the council has accepted the submission. The scheme is real but unapproved.
• Applications decided in this week. Approvals, refusals and withdrawals. This is the list that names jobs with permission to happen.

They are the same tool with a radio button. On Leeds City Council, for instance, the weekly list at publicaccess.leeds.gov.uk lets you pick a week beginning date going back a year, choose "Validated in this week" or "Decided in this week", and filter by any of thirty-three wards or thirty-one parishes before you press search. Nearly every English council runs a portal of that shape, because most of them buy the same software.

Three national entry points sit above the councils:

Scotland runs its own front door. eDevelopment.scot is the single sign-on that takes you into ePlanning.scot for planning applications and eBuildingStandards.scot for building warrants, and Scottish councils publish weekly lists in the same way.

What each application type is telling you about time

The type is the timing signal. A householder application and an outline permission are both approvals, and they are years apart in what they mean for your diary.

Those periods come from article 34 of the 2015 Order: 13 weeks for major development, 10 weeks for technical details consent for major development and for public service infrastructure development, 5 weeks for technical details consent that is not major development, 16 weeks where an environmental statement is involved, and 8 weeks for everything else.

Two statutory clocks decide how long an approval stays worth chasing. Under section 91 of the 1990 Act, a full permission in England carries a condition that development must begin within three years of the grant. Under section 92, an outline gives three years to apply for approval of the reserved matters and then two years from the final reserved matters approval to begin the development.

Read those two together and the reserved matters decision becomes the most useful line on any weekly list. An outline approval is a scheme that might happen. A reserved matters approval is a scheme with a two year statutory clock on it, drawings signed off, and a developer who has spent money twice.

The decision notice, and the two names on the form

Open the decision on the portal and you get a PDF of two or three pages. It carries the application reference, the decision date, the description of development in the authority's own wording, a list of the approved drawing numbers, and the conditions.

The conditions are the programme. Condition 1 is the section 91 three year commencement condition. Condition 2 usually ties the permission to the listed drawings. After that come the ones that decide when a spade goes in.

Section 100ZA(8) of the 1990 Act defines a pre-commencement condition as one that has to be met before any building or other operation comprised in the development is begun, or before a material change of use starts. Section 100ZA(5) then does something useful for you: a planning permission other than an outline cannot be granted subject to a pre-commencement condition without the written agreement of the applicant to its terms. So a decision notice carrying four pre-commencement conditions is not an authority being difficult. It is a set of terms the applicant signed up to, and each one is a piece of work somebody has to produce and pay for before the main job starts.

Typical pre-commencement conditions, and what each one hands you:

Now the names. The application form has two: the applicant, who is the person or company paying, and the agent, who is the architect, architectural technician or planning consultant who prepared and submitted it. Councils redact personal data before publishing, so signatures and private phone numbers come out, and what survives varies by authority. The agent's business address and practice name survive most reliably, because a business address is not personal data.

The agent is the call to make, for three reasons. They know where the scheme sits in its sequence, which the applicant often does not. They are the person the client will ask for a recommendation when the drawings go out. And they are repeat business: a small practice that files thirty applications a year is thirty leads, and you only have to be useful to them once.

The signals that mean the job is actually starting

An approval tells you a job exists. Five other public filings tell you a job is imminent, and they are filed because the law requires them to be filed, not because anybody wants you to know.

A discharge of conditions application. It appears on the same Public Access portal, quotes the parent permission as its reference, and is determined in eight weeks. Somebody paying an agent to discharge pre-commencement conditions is a client with funding in place and a start date in mind. It is the strongest signal on the register, and it is the one a lead list bought by keyword tends to miss, because the description on a discharge application is a condition number rather than a description of the building work.

A section 80 demolition notice. Section 80 of the Building Act 1984 says no person shall begin a demolition to which the section applies unless they have given the local authority notice of intention to do so, with copies to the occupier of any adjacent building, the public gas supplier and the public electricity supplier. The section then bars the work from starting until either the authority has served a notice under section 81 or the relevant period has expired, and section 81 defines that relevant period as six weeks from the giving of the section 80 notice. That is roughly six weeks of warning that a building is coming down and a site is about to be cleared. The exceptions in section 80 are worth knowing so you do not wait for a notice that will not come: internal parts of a building intended to remain occupied, buildings with a cubic content of not more than 1,750 cubic feet, which is about 50 cubic metres, and most agricultural buildings.

A Part 11 Class B prior approval. Separately from the Building Act notice, demolition is usually permitted development under Part 11 of Schedule 2 to the General Permitted Development Order 2015, subject to a prior approval application on the method of demolition and any proposed restoration of the site. The authority has 28 days, the applicant has to display a site notice for at least 21 days, and work cannot begin before written notice that prior approval is not required, written approval, or the 28 days running out. It publishes on the weekly list like any other application.

A CIL commencement notice. Where a scheme is liable for the Community Infrastructure Levy, regulation 67 of the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010 requires a commencement notice, on the Secretary of State's form, identifying the liability notice and stating the intended commencement date, and it must reach the collecting authority no later than the day before the day the chargeable development is commenced. Regulation 83 gives that requirement teeth: fail to submit it and the collecting authority may impose a surcharge of 20% of the chargeable amount or £2,500, whichever is lower. That is why the notice gets filed even on schemes where the paperwork is otherwise casual, and it is why a commencement notice is the closest thing England has to a dated start on site.

The building control commencement notice. Regulation 16 of the Building Regulations 2010 provides that a person proposing to carry out building work must not start unless they have given the relevant authority notice of intention to start work and at least two days have elapsed since the end of the day the notice was given. Two days is not a lead time you can sell into, but it is the confirmation that everything upstream was real.

Building control after the Building Safety Act

Building control is where planning stops and the trades start, and the vocabulary changed on 6 April 2024. Approved Inspectors ceased to exist. The organisation is now a Registered Building Control Approver, the individual is a Registered Building Inspector, and both are registered with the Building Safety Regulator. If a client tells you they have an approved inspector, they have an out of date phrase and possibly an out of date contact.

Three routes exist for ordinary work, and each leaves a different trail:

• Local authority building control, by an application for building control approval with full plans, or by a building notice for smaller domestic work where drawings are not deposited in advance.
• A Registered Building Control Approver, engaged privately. They and the client serve an initial notice on the local authority, which then hands the function over.
• Regularisation, applied for after unauthorised work has been done, which is a different kind of lead and usually an urgent one.

For work covered by a Competent Person Scheme, the installer self certifies and no building control application is made at all. Those schemes are FENSA and Certass for glazing, Gas Safe for gas, NICEIC and NAPIT for Part P electrical work, OFTEC for oil, HETAS for solid fuel, APHC for plumbing and heating, NFRC for roofing and CIGA for cavity wall insulation. That gap in the record cuts both ways: it means a planning list will not show you a rewire, and it means scheme membership is itself the route the work arrives by, which is the argument for being on a Part P competent person scheme rather than notifying every job.

Then there is the higher-risk regime, which is where timing stops being a nuisance and becomes cash flow. A building is higher-risk if it is at least 18 metres tall or has at least 7 storeys, and contains at least 2 residential units. For those buildings the Building Safety Regulator is the building control authority, and the guidance is unambiguous: you must not start any building work until the building control application is approved. That approval is Gateway 2. Gateway 1 sits back at planning, where the Regulator is a statutory consultee. Gateway 3 is the completion certificate before anyone moves in.

Regulation 5 of the Building (Higher-Risk Buildings Procedures) (England) Regulations 2023 gives the Regulator 12 weeks from a valid application to decide, for a new higher-risk building or for a stage of the work, with any longer period available by written agreement between the parties. On 27 January 2026 the Regulator itself left the Health and Safety Executive and became a standalone arm's length body sponsored by MHCLG.

The practical consequence for a subcontractor is a date change. On a higher-risk building the day the job becomes real is the day Gateway 2 is granted, not the day the contract is signed, and a firm that mobilises labour against the contract date can spend twelve weeks paying people to wait.

One scheme, dated end to end

Take a full permission for a pair of semi-detached houses on an infill plot, decided on 12 March 2026, approved with conditions 3, 4 and 5 pre-commencement: materials, surface water drainage, and a construction management plan.

The gap between the first row and the fourth is six months. That is the whole opportunity, and it is free to watch.

Twenty minutes a week, and what to say when you ring

Set it as a recurring appointment on the same morning each week, because the lists refresh weekly and a missed week is a missed week.

Once a month, add ten minutes for section 80 demolition notices on the council's building control pages and any Part 11 Class B prior approvals on the weekly list. Those are the six week warnings.

Then the call, which is the part people get wrong by treating it as a sales call. Ring the agent, not the client, on the first contact. A script that works, with the reference and the date filled in from the decision notice:

Morning, it's Dan at Ashworth Groundworks. I saw you got approval on
24/01893/FUL at Mill Lane on the twelfth. I do the groundworks and
drainage on schemes that size in this area. Where is it up to, is the
client taking it out to tender or finding trades direct, and is there
anything on the drainage condition you want a price on before it goes
back to the council?

Four things are doing work in that. You have named the reference and the date, which says you read the file rather than bought a list. You have said what you do in one clause. You have asked where the job is in its sequence, which is a question an agent can answer in ten seconds and enjoys answering. And you have offered a price on the pre-commencement condition, which is work that has to happen before the main job and that the client has probably not budgeted for yet.

If the answer is "it is going to tender in the spring", log the date and ring back in six weeks. If the answer is "the client is finding trades themselves", ask for an introduction and offer to send your public liability certificate and two references the same day. If the answer is "we are not sure it is going ahead", note the section 91 long stop date and check the portal for a discharge application every couple of months.

The follow up cadence is what turns twenty minutes a week into a pipeline: decision date logged, call at week one, call again when a discharge of conditions application appears, quote when the drawings arrive.

What it costs

Every source on this page is free. The planning register has to be open to public inspection under section 69 of the 1990 Act, the weekly lists are published by the councils themselves, gov.uk's postcode router costs nothing, and planning.data.gov.uk publishes its 117 datasets and its API without a fee. There is a paid layer above it, and it is worth knowing what you are choosing not to buy: Glenigan, Barbour ABI, the Builders' Conference and Planning Pipe research roughly half a million planning applications a year and track schemes through approval, tender, contract award and subcontract award. What they sell is coverage of the whole country. What you need is three councils and twenty minutes.

On AEC Stack there is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through the platform, taken when the invoice is paid, so a quiet month costs nothing. The leads you lift off a weekly list sit in the same place as the quote you send the agent and the invoice that follows it, which is how you find out, after two quarters, whether planning lists or tender portals are actually feeding your work.

Pull up your council's weekly list of decisions for last week, filter it to your wards, and count how many of last week’s approvals are work you could have priced. Then set the rest of your UK paperwork up once, on the UK rules page.