Sources, methods and coverage.
Appeal Search brings together Planning Inspectorate appeal records and the text of the decision letters, so decisions can be searched by what they say as well as by their case details.
Case records
For each appeal: reference, site address, council, appeal type, procedure, outcome, decision date and linked appeals, from the Planning Inspectorate’s published appeal records. Names of appellants, agents and case officers are not stored as separate fields.
Decision letters
The text of each decision letter and costs decision is cleaned up (page headers and footers removed, characters repaired) and rebuilt into its numbered paragraphs, so every search result and report points to the paragraph it came from. Every decision page links to the official PDF on the Planning Inspectorate’s Appeals Casework Portal. About one letter in ten is incomplete in the source text; those pages say so.
Synopses, inspectors and main issues
Synopses are assembled from the letter itself: the development proposed, the outcome, the main issues and the inspector’s concluding sentence. Nothing is paraphrased or generated. The inspector’s name is read from the top of the letter. Main issues are identified from the “main issues” paragraph and the section headings, using a fixed list of 16 topics.
Coverage
Decisions are being added a year at a time, starting with the most recent. The banner at the top of each page shows the dates the archive currently covers.
How the statistics work
- Allowed share = allowed ÷ (allowed + dismissed). Split decisions and part-allowed appeals are shown separately and left out of the share. For enforcement appeals, a quashed notice or a grant of permission counts as allowed, and an upheld or varied notice as dismissed. Withdrawn, invalid and undecided appeals are excluded.
- Inspectors are grouped by initial and surname as printed on the letters (so “D Moore” and “Debbie Moore” are one person). Two inspectors who share an initial and surname may be combined. Tables apply a minimum number of decisions before a share is ranked.
- “Likely outcome, based on similar decisions” looks at the 25 decisions most relevant to a search, weights them by relevance and age, and reports the allowed share, the issues the dismissed appeals involved and the record over the last 12 months. It describes past decisions. It does not predict the outcome for a particular site.
- Searching matches whole words and their plurals (“dormer” finds “dormers”). Words of fewer than three letters and very common words are ignored; put several words in quotes to search for an exact phrase.
Roadmap
| Stage | What it adds | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Search, trends, inspector and council tables, reports, guides | The site you are using | Live |
| Earlier years | More years of decisions, added most recent first | In progress |
| Daily updates | New decisions added as they are published | Planned |
| Email reports | Reports emailed as PDF with copies of the decision letters | Planned |
| Alerts | Email alerts for new decisions matching a saved search | Planned |
If the archive cannot be reached, pages fall back to a small set of fictional sample decisions and say so in an amber banner.