UK Planning Applications Scraper: Weekly Lists from 15 Councils

What it does

Planning applications are one of the few public signals that building work is about to happen. The trouble is that every council publishes them on its own portal, with its own search forms and weekly lists, so checking a dozen areas each Monday is a morning's work.

This actor reads the weekly lists from 15 UK council planning portals (all verified Idox portals) and returns them as one dataset: council, application reference, proposal text, site address, status, received and validated dates, and a deep link to the council's own application page. Choose validated for newly accepted applications or decided for fresh decisions, and how many recent weeks to fetch.

Validated applications are a proven lead source for builders, scaffolders, architects and other trades; decisions are useful to developers, land sourcers and analysts. Applicant and agent personal details are deliberately not collected, and the actor is polite to councils at no more than one request per second per portal.

How it works

1. You pick councils from the list (or leave it empty for all 15), the list type (validated or decided) and how many weeks back to go.
2. For each council the actor opens the portal's weekly list and reads up to 20 result pages, about 200 applications at the usual page size.
3. Rows are normalised into one schema with council, reference, proposal, address, status, dates and the application URL.
4. If one council portal is down, that council is flagged in the run log and exit message and the run carries on with the rest.
5. The run stops at maxResults or your spend limit, and you are charged only for applications delivered.

Input example

A typical run input (JSON). Every field is also available as a form in the Apify console.

{
  "councils": [
    "leeds",
    "bradford",
    "york"
  ],
  "weeksBack": 2,
  "dateType": "validated",
  "maxResults": 500
}

Output example

Every application comes back in the same shape whichever council it came from:

Pricing

Pay per event: you are charged only for the results you receive, with no subscription. Set a maximum total charge on any run and it stops cleanly at the cap.

Prices are read from the live Apify Store listing when this page is built. The listing is always authoritative.

Use cases

How it compares

If you need every council in the country, a commercial planning data platform or the portals themselves will reach further. If your patch is covered by the 15 councils here, this is a low-cost way to get clean weekly lists without visiting each portal.

Limits and honest notes

• Covers 15 councils at launch (listed in the input dropdown) — all verified Idox portals; a portal that fails is flagged in the run log and exit message, never silently dropped.
• Each council's weekly list is read up to 20 result pages (about 200 applications at the portals' usual page size), which covers a normal week for most councils; an unusually busy week at a large council can be cut off at that point.
• Weekly-list data as published by each council: reference, proposal, site address, status, received/validated dates, deep link. Applicant and agent personal details are deliberately not collected.
• A council portal outage degrades that council only — the run reports it and continues with the rest.
• Weekly lists roll over on Mondays — early in the week the newest list can be nearly empty. Set weeksBack to 2 if you always want a full week of applications.
• Polite by design: ≤1 request/second per council portal.
• Respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and the actor stops cleanly at the cap.

FAQ

Use it from code

Run the actor through the Apify API with the input above.

cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/actor-forge~uk-planning-applications/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"councils": ["leeds", "bradford", "york"], "weeksBack": 2, "dateType": "validated", "maxResults": 500}'

JavaScript (Node.js)

// Node.js 18+ (built-in fetch). Set APIFY_TOKEN in your environment.
const input = {
  "councils": [
    "leeds",
    "bradford",
    "york"
  ],
  "weeksBack": 2,
  "dateType": "validated",
  "maxResults": 500
};

const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/actor-forge~uk-planning-applications/run-sync-get-dataset-items",
  {
    method: "POST",
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.APIFY_TOKEN}`,
      "Content-Type": "application/json",
    },
    body: JSON.stringify(input),
  }
);
const items = await res.json();
console.log(items.length, items[0]);

Python

# pip install apify-client   (set APIFY_TOKEN in your environment)
import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])
run_input = {
    "councils": [
        "leeds",
        "bradford",
        "york"
    ],
    "weeksBack": 2,
    "dateType": "validated",
    "maxResults": 500
}

run = client.actor("actor-forge/uk-planning-applications").call(run_input=run_input)
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

The run-sync-get-dataset-items endpoint waits for the run (up to 5 minutes) and returns the dataset rows directly. For longer runs, start the run asynchronously and read the dataset when it finishes, as the Python example does. Replace APIFY_TOKEN with your own token from the Apify console.

Step-by-step guides

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