How we report planning news

Who the reporting is for

Planning news is written for homeowners in England, with particular attention to the decisions that follow a refused planning application. A useful article should help a reader understand what changed, who it affects, what facts or evidence may need checking and one sensible next research step.

It is an editorial layer over the existing appeals, local-authority and inspector research surfaces. It is not a policy library, a fourth planning database or a set of permanent story categories.

Discovery is separate from evidence

We monitor primary public-body sources, including GOV.UK, the Planning Inspectorate and selected local planning authorities. Google Alerts can reveal a lead, but an alert title, snippet or feed is never used as evidence. We open and check the underlying canonical official source before considering a story.

A change must be current, relevant to a concrete homeowner decision and materially different from existing coverage. A quiet update is a valid result when nothing meets that test.

Claims stay close to primary sources

Each article records the source publisher, title, canonical link, publication or update date where available, access date, locator and reuse licence where applicable. Consequential claims carry a nearby citation. We distinguish proposals, consultations, adopted changes, commencement dates, guidance and operational practice rather than treating them as interchangeable.

Local reporting links to the definitive Rules for You local-planning- authority profile. Source preparation retains the minimum facts and locators needed for checking; it does not copy policy libraries, contact details or unrelated personal information into the news content.

Appeal examples are bounded comparisons

For every selected story, the newsroom runs neutral semantic searches over current, privacy-processed appeal-decision passages. The search is driven by the verified facts in the official story, not by a desired appeal outcome. A technical search or source-currentness failure stops the article. A complete search with no useful comparison does not.

The article freezes either no appeal examples or two to four that have been checked against the official decisions. For each one we verify the reference, date, outcome, authority, proposal, relevant facts, source-located reasoning, paragraph or page locator, official link and a specific comparison limit. Search wording, candidate order, scores and internal record identifiers are not published. Internal source fingerprints support later rechecking but never appear on the page or in metadata.

Another appeal is not precedent for a homeowner's proposal. It does not predict prospects, and differences in the site, proposal and evidence can change the decision.

Drafting, local preview and publication

AI can help organise verified source material and prepare a draft. A prepared article keeps consequential claims close to the cited official sources and is checked for source support, privacy, usefulness and accessibility. The exact deployable page is then available on the local news hub for inspection.

The article file and its explicit registry entry are ordinary code changes. There is no CMS row, acceptance record or review date. The operator decides whether to publish by committing and deploying those changes. Each article identifies the fixed organisational author, discloses AI assistance and links back to this method.

Updates, corrections and withdrawals

A substantive update keeps the original publication date, changes the modification and source-check dates and repeats the applicable source and release checks. A material correction receives a visible dated note. Selected appeal evidence is rechecked when a relevant claim or comparison changes.

When an article is no longer supportable, its canonical address remains available with a dated withdrawal notice. Its original body and appeal examples are hidden, and the article is removed from the news hub, RSS feed and sitemap and marked not for search indexing. Read the site-wide corrections process to report a source issue.

Important appeal dates

The important dates page is a small list of England-wide appeal-rule and procedure dates drawn from published planning-news articles. Each date links back to the article that explains what it controls and to the official sources used for that explanation. It is not an exhaustive register of planning rules or policy dates.

We distinguish a confirmed official date, a provisional official date and a Rules for You review reminder. A review reminder is an editorial date chosen in response to an official window such as a season or quarter; it is not presented as a commencement or applicability date. Corrected and cancelled dates remain accountable through the owning article and calendar revision history.

Feed and service limits

The planning news RSS feed contains article titles, summaries, dates and canonical links only. It does not reproduce article bodies or appeal passages.

The important dates calendar is a subscription feed. It changes only after checked article metadata is committed and deployed, and your calendar application decides when to refresh it and how to show its one-week reminders. Downloading the file once does not keep that copy updated.

Rules for You is a research service, not a government body and not a provider of legal or professional planning advice. An article does not recommend an appeal over amendment or resubmission. Start with the exact refusal reason, check the current official material and obtain appropriately qualified help when the decision requires it.

Return to planning news.