Terms of Use & Sale

planningconstraints.com (the “Service”) is operated by Broadhurst Digital Limited(“we”, “us”), a company registered in England & Wales. Registered office: 18 St Nicholas Place, Derby, DE1 3GD. Company No. 12503471. VAT Reg. No. GB355920584.

General enquiries: support@planningconstraints.com. Billing, payment and VAT enquiries: support@planningconstraints.com. By using the Service you agree to these terms.

The Service aggregates publicly available planning and environmental data from official sources and presents it for general information. It is a screening and research tool only.

The Service, including paid reports, is not: professional, legal, planning, surveying or financial advice; an official local authority search (such as an LLC1 or CON29); an official HM Land Registry document; a coal mining report; or a substitute for any of these. Do not make purchase, sale, design or construction decisions in reliance on the Service alone. Always verify findings with the relevant local planning authority and take professional advice appropriate to your project.

Data is drawn from official open sources including planning.data.gov.uk (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government), Historic England, Natural England, the Environment Agency and the Mining Remediation Authority in England; Cadw, RCAHMW and Natural Resources Wales in Wales; Historic Environment Scotland, NatureScot, SEPA and the Improvement Service in Scotland; plus HM Land Registry INSPIRE Index Polygons and Ordnance Survey, under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and related licences (see Licences & attribution).

These datasets may be incomplete, out of date or contain errors, and coverage varies by local authority. Some designations (for example certain tree preservation orders and Article 4 directions) are not yet digitised nationally and will not appear even where they exist. Search results reflect the data available from the sources at the moment of your search. Parcel boundaries are HM Land Registry index polygons: indicative general boundaries only, not the legal boundary of any title.

Paid land-ownership features additionally use HM Land Registry's CCOD and OCOD corporate-ownership datasets. Unlike the sources above, these are licensed data, not open data, used under HM Land Registry's own licence — see the land-ownership section below and the Licences & attribution page.

The free tier provides interactive on-screen searches. Paid products are: the Site Report Pass (£9.99 one-off), which unlocks the Full Survey Report, CSV export, whole-parcel and wide-radius search for one address (within approximately 500 m of the purchased location) for 30 days on activated devices; and Pro(subscription), which unlocks the same features for any address while the subscription is active. Licence keys are for the purchaser's use (or their organisation's reasonable internal use) and may not be resold or shared publicly. We also sell one-off, site-specific evidence packs (see the next section). All prices include UK VAT at 20%; a VAT receipt is issued on every purchase via Stripe.

We also sell the Site Pass + Monitoring (£24.99 one-off), and two organisation subscriptions — Team and Practice — which are described in section 04A.

Team and Practice.Team (£49/month or £490/year) provides five seats and one shared workspace. Practice (£99/month or £990/year) provides fifteen seats and adds bulk CSV screening, organisation API keys and the white-label client portal described in section 08A. Both are bought by an organisation: the person who claims the workspace confirms they are authorised to accept these terms on that organisation's behalf, and these terms then apply to the organisation and to everyone it admits — every seat holder, guest and API key. Seats are for named individuals in, or engaged by, the organisation, and a seat is not to be shared between people. Guest access is free, read-only, and not counted against your seats; we apply a fair-use ceiling of twenty-five guests per organisation and will raise it on request.

Site Pass + Monitoring (£24.99). A one-off purchase covering one location for 365 days: the Full Survey Report and CSV export for that location, plus a weekly re-check of the constraint layers at the point you bought, with an email when something changes. One clock governs both — report access and monitoring end together at 365 days. Monitoring compares what our sources publish from one week to the next. It is not a live alert service and not a guarantee that every change affecting a site will be detected or detected promptly: a change reaches us only when the publishing body puts it into the dataset we read, which for some designations takes weeks or does not happen at all (section 02). Where one of our sources is unavailable in a given week we record that the check was degraded rather than reporting the site as unchanged, and we will tell you.

Bulk screening and the API. Practice includes 500 bulk CSV rows and 1,000 API screens per calendar month (UTC), counted per organisation and reset at the start of each month. These are included allowances, not metered charges: when an allowance is used up the Service refuses further requests and tells you when it resets — we never bill you for exceeding it without asking. API keys are additionally subject to a burst limit of 60 requests per minute per key. We may change these allowances or limits on reasonable notice, and may apply a temporary ceiling where our own upstream sources are at risk.

Using API keys.Keys are issued to an organisation for use in that organisation's own systems. Keep them secret and use them server-side; a key published in client-side code, a public repository or a shared document is your responsibility until you rotate it, and you should tell us if one is exposed. We grant your organisation a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use API responses in its own products and internal systems, on the conditions in section 08A — in particular that the attribution strings returned in the response are reproduced wherever the data is shown to anyone. You must not use the API to build or seed a competing constraints dataset, and you must not present a layer listed in the response's failuresarray as a clear result: that layer was not successfully checked, and reporting it as “nothing found” misstates our data to whoever reads it.

Suspension, and what happens when a subscription ends. We may suspend a key, a seat or an organisation immediately where these terms are being breached, where a key is being used in a way that threatens the Service or the public data sources it depends on, or where payment fails; we will tell you why and, where the cause is fixable, what would lift it. Otherwise we will give at least 30 days' notice before withdrawing access. You can cancel at any time in the billing portal, effective at the end of the current billing period (section 06). When a subscription ends, seats and API keys stop working, the client portal stops serving new views, and hosted report links created under it stop resolving; reports and exports you have already downloaded remain yours to keep and use under section 08A. Tell us before you cancel if you need to export your workspace and we will help.

Sections 07, 08, 08A, 09 and 10 apply to Team, Practice, monitoring and API use. An organisation buying these products is a business customer, and the business provisions of section 09 apply to it.

Evidence packs (currently Flood & Levels, Heritage Terrain Figures, Sunlight Screening and ZTV / Visibility) are one-off purchases generated for the specific location you choose, from remote-sensed survey data (LiDAR elevation models) and official published datasets. Every figure in a pack states the survey vintage and vertical accuracy (RMSE) of the data it was computed from. Ground conditions may have changed since the survey date.

Each pack is a screening assessment. It is not — and does not replace — a Flood Risk Assessment, a Heritage Desk-Based Assessment, a BRE daylight and sunlight assessment, a Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment, a topographical survey, or any other professional report, and it is not professional advice. Where a pack expresses a view (for example, that standing advice is “likely to apply”), that is a likelihood computed from published rules and mapped data as at the date of generation. It is never a guarantee of how a local planning authority, the Environment Agency or any other body will decide: they exercise their own judgment on the application before them, and their decision prevails. Do not make purchase, design or construction decisions on a pack alone.

Packs are generated and delivered automatically, normally within 30 minutes. We deliver the whole pack or none of it: if we cannot generate every deliverable figure for your location, we refund the purchase automatically rather than deliver a partial pack. A pack is for your (or your organisation's reasonable internal) use on the matter it was bought for; you may share it with your professional advisers and others working with you on that matter.

Payments are processed by Stripe; we do not see or store card details. Subscriptions renew automatically and can be cancelled at any time via the billing portal, taking effect at the end of the current billing period.

Paid content is digital content supplied immediately. By purchasing you expressly consent to immediate supply and acknowledge that you lose the statutory 14-day cancellation right once supply has begun. That said: if a report fails to generate, or you believe its data is materially wrong, contact us and we will put it right or refund you. Your statutory rights as a consumer (including under the Consumer Rights Act 2015) are unaffected.

You may not: scrape, bulk-download or systematically extract data from the Service; resell, sublicense or white-label the Service or its reports without our written agreement (the Practice tier's portal white-label, described in section 08A, is that written agreement — nothing further is needed); use the Service to build a competing dataset; use any ownership information we show you for direct marketing of any kind, including contacting registered proprietors to promote or offer goods or services; extract or redistribute the underlying land-ownership data as a standalone dataset or product; bypass technical or rate limits; or use the Service unlawfully. We may suspend access that breaches these terms.

Some paid features combine HM Land Registry corporate ownership data — the CCOD dataset (companies and other corporate bodies registered in the UK) and the OCOD dataset (overseas companies), each covering property in England and Wales — with our planning-constraints data, mapping and analysis. That combined output is a value-added product we are licensed to provide; the underlying data remains the property of HM Land Registry and is used under a separate HM Land Registry licence, not under the Open Government Licence.

We show ownership at postcode-district level — the company or organisation named as registered proprietor, its country of incorporation, proprietorship category and title counts. We do not publish exact property addresses, and ownership is matched to a location by postcode, not by title-plan boundary. It is a screening indicator only: it is not proof of ownership, not an official copy of the register, and reflects HM Land Registry's monthly snapshot (we show the data month wherever ownership appears), which can lag actual transactions by weeks or months. Always confirm ownership with an official copy of the register before relying on it.

When you use these features we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to view and use the ownership information we present to you, for your own (or your organisation's reasonable internal) research and decision-making. You may share a report or result containing this information with your professional advisers, or with others working with you on the same matter, on the basis that they use it only for that matter and on these same conditions. Beyond that, you may not sub-license, resell, publish or otherwise make this information available to anyone else. In particular you must not: (a) extract, copy or redistribute the underlying HM Land Registry data as a standalone product or dataset; (b) use it for direct marketing of any kind, including contacting registered proprietors to promote or offer goods or services; or (c) use it for any purpose contrary to any law, regulation or regulatory code. These conditions are required by HM Land Registry's licence and are passed on to you as its end user. Your permission under this section ends if our licence from HM Land Registry ends or if your right to use the Service ends.

The ownership data itself is provided “as is”, and neither we nor HM Land Registry give any warranty as to its accuracy or completeness. Nothing in this section limits or excludes your statutory rights against us as a consumer, including under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, in respect of anything you buy from us — see the Disclaimers section of these terms. HM Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail are not parties to these terms, but each may enforce the conditions in this section against you directly under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999. These terms may otherwise be varied or rescinded without the consent of those third parties, and no other person has rights under that Act. To meet HM Land Registry's licence we keep a record of end users of these features — the contact details you provide when you purchase (such as your email address) and technical logs such as IP address — and may be required to make those records available to HM Land Registry on request for audit purposes. See our Privacy Policy for details.

When you buy a report, or generate one under a subscription, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use it — the page, its PDF, Word and CSV exports, and its hosted link — for the site and matter it was produced for: your own, or your organisation's reasonable internal, research, decision-making and advice on that matter. You may share it with your professional advisers, with your client on that matter, and with others working with you on it, on the basis that they use it only for that matter and on these same conditions.

A report speaks as at the data vintages printed on it. We have no obligation to update it once generated, and it should not be relied on for a different site, a different matter, or at a later date without running it again.

If you are reading a report someone else bought. It was prepared for that person, for their matter, as an automated screening of public datasets — not as advice to you. It is not a local authority search and not professional advice, and we do not accept responsibility to you for any decision you take on the strength of it. If the decision matters to you, commission your own search and your own advice.

Attribution. If you pass a report, an export or any of its data to anyone else, you must keep every source and attribution statement it carries exactly as it appears — including the Open Government Licence notices, the HM Land Registry statement and the Ordnance Survey copyright line — and you must pass this same obligation on to whoever receives it. These statements are conditions of the licences we hold from the data publishers rather than our own branding, and no tier of this Service removes them.

White-label (Practice tier). A Practice organisation may present the client portal and the reports in it under its own logo and colours. This removes our product credit only. The source list and the screening disclaimer on every report stay exactly where they are, and the organisation stays responsible for its own clients' compliance with this section. Re-branding a report does not make it that organisation's professional advice, and it does not transfer any responsibility for it to us.

Except as set out in section 08, a person who is not a party to these terms has no right under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 to enforce any of them.

If you are a consumer. We owe you the standards the law sets: anything you buy from us must be of satisfactory quality, fit for any purpose you told us about, and as described, and we must supply our services with reasonable care and skill. Nothing in these terms takes away those rights or the remedies that come with them under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, including repair, replacement, a price reduction or a refund. We are responsible for foreseeable loss we cause by failing to meet those standards. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, for loss caused by using the Service for something it is not — it is a screening tool, as section 02 explains, not a search or professional advice — or for business losses; if you are using the Service for the purposes of a business, the business terms below apply to you instead of this paragraph.

If you are a business. The Service and everything it produces are supplied as a screening tool to be used alongside your own professional judgement, not in place of it, and are provided “as is” and “as available”. To the maximum extent permitted by law we exclude all implied warranties, including accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose and uninterrupted availability, and we are not liable for loss of profit, business or opportunity, for losses arising from decisions made in reliance on the Service or its reports, or for any indirect or consequential loss. Our total aggregate liability to a business customer for all claims arising in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of £100 and the fees that customer paid us in that period.

For everyone.Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any other liability that cannot be excluded by law. Nothing in these terms affects consumers' statutory rights.

We may update the Service and these terms; material changes will be posted on this page with a new “last updated” date. These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction (consumers may also rely on mandatory protections of their country of residence).