GetPlanningPermission

Methodology

How we calculate your approval score

Your score is not a guess. It is a deterministic calculation built from national open planning data, your council’s real decision record, and the planning rules that apply to your property — the same designations a planning officer checks first.

The pipeline

  1. Locate the property. Your postcode is resolved to exact coordinates and your local planning authority using ONS boundary data.
  2. Check 10 site constraints. We query your coordinates against national constraint datasets: conservation areas, listed buildings, Article 4 directions, green belt, AONB/National Landscape, tree preservation zones, flood zones, scheduled monuments, world heritage sites and SSSIs.
  3. Weigh your project. Each project type starts from its real national approval rate for householder applications. Constraints, property type, tenure and scale then adjust it — the same factors that drive real decisions.
  4. Apply your council’s record. Councils differ. We adjust for your authority’s householder approval rate from official planning statistics.
  5. Test Permitted Development. If your project may not need permission at all, your report says so — and your score reflects the stronger fallback position.

Data sources

  • planning.data.gov.uk (MHCLG) — the national planning data platform: conservation areas, listed buildings, Article 4 directions, green belt, AONB, TPO zones, monuments and more.
  • Environment Agency — Flood Map for Planning flood zones 2 and 3.
  • ONS / postcodes.io — postcode coordinates, wards and local planning authority boundaries.
  • MHCLG live planning statistics — quarterly per-council decision volumes and approval rates.
  • PlanIt — an aggregated register of 20+ million UK planning applications, used for comparable decisions near you.
  • Historic England — listing grades and entries on the National Heritage List for England.

Where a council has not published a dataset (some Article 4 and TPO data), your report says “not confirmed” — we never invent a result.

Who we are

GetPlanningPermission is a London architectural practice — MCIAT chartered, £2M PI insured, LABC partnered and ICO registered — with 2,400+ drawings delivered and a 96% approval rate. The scoring rules were written by the same chartered team that prepares and defends real applications every week.

Honest limitations

Your score is indicative guidance, not formal planning advice and not a council decision. Planning is judged case-by-case: design quality, neighbour responses and officer judgement all matter. Constraint data is point-in-polygon against national datasets and should be confirmed before you commit to a design. That’s exactly what our team does — talk to us.