How we score planning potential

We intersect your boundary — or a point, if you have not drawn one — with the national designation datasets and report each hit separately rather than rolling them into a single traffic light. That matters because designations are not interchangeable: a conservation area imposes a duty to pay special attention to preserving or enhancing character, while a Site of Special Scientific Interest engages a near-prohibition on harm, and ancient woodland is treated as irreplaceable habitat where loss should be refused unless there are wholly exceptional reasons.

National Landscapes (formerly AONBs) and National Parks attract great weight for conserving landscape and scenic beauty, and major development within them is only permitted in exceptional circumstances following an assessment of need, alternatives and detriment. Listed buildings and scheduled monuments bring the setting question with them: harm can arise from development on land that is not itself designated, which is why we report designations within and adjoining the boundary.

Nothing here is a refusal in itself. Designation constrains scale, layout and location on the site far more often than it rules development out, and much of our work with promoters is about where within a holding a scheme can go.

The December 2024 NPPF introduced Grey Belt as land in the Green Belt comprising previously developed land and/or any other land that does not strongly contribute to Green Belt purposes (a) checking unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas, (b) preventing neighbouring towns merging, or (d) preserving the setting and special character of historic towns. Purposes (c) safeguarding the countryside from encroachment and (e) assisting urban regeneration are deliberately excluded from the test, which is why sites that feel rural can still qualify.

Where Grey Belt is established, development is not inappropriate provided there is demonstrable unmet need for the relevant development, the site is in a sustainable location, and the development would not fundamentally undermine the purposes of the remaining Green Belt across the plan area. Residential schemes must then meet the golden rules: 50% affordable housing subject to viability, necessary improvements to local or national infrastructure, and provision of accessible new green space.

Our review is indicative and site-level. A defensible Grey Belt case is built from the authority's own Green Belt review and a purpose-by-purpose assessment on the ground; we tell you whether that work is worth commissioning, and we never present our output as a conclusion.

The 2020 reform of the Use Classes Order created the broad commercial, business and service Class E, within which movement between shops, financial services, restaurants and cafés, offices, light industry, clinics, nurseries, gyms and indoor sport is not development at all. Class F.1 learning and non-residential institutions and Class F.2 local community uses sit outside it, and a long list of uses — pubs and drinking establishments, hot food takeaways, cinemas, live music venues, petrol filling stations and betting shops among them — remain sui generis, meaning any change to or from them needs an application.

Roadside and drive-thru schemes are where this bites hardest. A restaurant or café is Class E(b) while a hot food takeaway is sui generis, and a drive-thru layout brings its own highway, queuing, servicing, noise and litter case regardless of the class. Retail proposals outside a defined centre engage the sequential and, above defined thresholds, the impact test on town centre vitality.

For employment and logistics we look at whether the site sits within an allocated employment area or a protected industrial designation, because loss of employment land is one of the most common reasons a commercial-to-residential proposal is resisted at plan level even where the physical constraints are benign.

We set out which route is available — no development, prior approval, or full application — and what evidence each route demands, so the appraisal reflects the real consenting risk rather than a generic score.

The General Permitted Development Order grants planning permission for defined classes of development subject to conditions and limitations, and several of those classes are transformative for landowners: Class MA allows commercial, business and service floorspace to become dwellinghouses subject to prior approval, Class Q covers agricultural buildings converted to dwellings, and Part 6 covers agricultural development on units above and below five hectares.

Every class carries qualifying conditions that are routinely missed. Class MA requires the building to have been in Class E use for two years, vacant for three months, and — with limited exceptions — not to sit in a listed building or scheduled monument, with prior approval covering matters including transport, contamination, flooding, noise and natural light. Class Q is limited by floorspace and dwelling caps and by whether the building is structurally capable of conversion without substantial rebuilding.

Article 4 directions are the decisive local overlay. Authorities use them to withdraw rights — most commonly Class MA in town centres and Class L houses in multiple occupation in university cities — and a direction converts a prior approval into a full application with all the policy tests that brings. Article 2(3) land, conservation areas, National Parks and National Landscapes also restrict or remove classes outright.

We report PDR as commentary rather than certainty. Whether a specific building qualifies is a matter for a lawful development certificate or a prior approval application, and we say so.

Section 38(6) makes the development plan the starting point, so the age, status and review stage of that plan set the terms of engagement. A plan adopted within the last five years and supported by a five year supply gives the authority the strongest hand; a plan being examined under Regulation 24, or one where a Regulation 18 consultation is imminent, opens a window to promote land through the plan itself.

We map each authority to the statutory stages — evidence gathering, Regulation 18 issues and options, draft plan, Regulation 19 publication, submission under Regulation 22, examination, and adoption — and record the dates that are published. Call for Sites windows are the practical entry point for landowners and are often open for a matter of weeks, which is why we monitor them per authority rather than nationally.

Plan-level housing evidence is reported alongside: the housing requirement, the five year housing land supply position, and the Housing Delivery Test result. Where a plan is more than five years old and the housing requirement is not up to date, the policies most important for determining the application can be out of date, which changes the balance a decision-maker must strike.

We search decided applications within a defined radius of your boundary and report approval and refusal counts, the mix of application types, and the units consented where that figure is published. Consistency matters in decision-making: a nearby approval on materially similar land is a material consideration, and a run of refusals on the same policy ground is a warning that no amount of design work will resolve.

Appeal outcomes carry more weight than first-instance decisions because they contain reasoned findings on the policy tests. Section 78 appeals against refusal, and the statutory challenges under section 288 that follow, are where the tests for Green Belt harm, housing land supply and heritage balance are worked out in practice — which is why we run a separate case law section reading recent judgments in full.

Coverage is uneven and we say so. Application data on the national platform depends on what each authority publishes and how consistently it is maintained, so a low count in a rural area is often a data gap rather than an absence of development.

Flood risk is handled through a sequential approach: development should be steered to areas at least risk, and where a site in a higher-risk zone is proposed, the sequential test and, for more vulnerable uses, the exception test must be satisfied. Zone 2 rarely stops housing but adds evidence cost; Zone 3a and 3b change the developable area, the vulnerability classification and the finished floor level strategy, and functional floodplain is effectively undevelopable for most uses.

Site geometry is calculated from your drawn boundary in hectares and acres and used for indicative capacity, because a constraint that removes a fifth of a 2 hectare site has a different consequence than on 20 hectares. Distance to the nearest settlement edge is used as a proxy for accessibility to services, which is the practical shape of the sustainability test in most rural refusals.

Where relevant we also flag the environmental gateways that stall otherwise consentable schemes — nutrient and water neutrality catchments, agricultural land quality, and mandatory biodiversity net gain, all of which need land or off-site units and should be priced into a promotion appraisal from the start.

Every check is reported with its source, the time it was retrieved and a status. If a national dataset responds and returns no intersecting record, we say not present. If the request fails, times out or returns an error, we say unavailable — and the confidence rating drops accordingly. That distinction is the difference between an appraisal you can rely on and one that quietly hides a Green Belt designation behind a failed API call.

The Planning Potential Score and the confidence rating are deliberately separate numbers. The score answers how favourable the evidence is; confidence answers how much of the evidence we actually obtained. A high score on low confidence is a prompt to commission searches, not a green light.

Every row in the report links to the underlying record on the official source so an agent, planner or solicitor can verify it independently. Nothing in the platform is modelled, interpolated or estimated, and nothing is cached long enough to go stale without being re-checked.