UK Planning Decision Notice and Officer Report Text

Get the full text of the documents attached to a UK planning application, not just the register entry.

Give this actor a planning application and it returns the complete written text of the Decision Notice and the Officer Report, pulled straight from the council's own portal and cleaned up ready to read or feed into your own analysis.

How this is different

Other UK planning tools return the register listing: reference number, address, proposal, decision, dates, applicant, agent. That tells you what was decided.

This actor returns the documents behind that listing. That tells you why it was decided, in the council's own words: the reasons for refusal, the policies cited, the officer's assessment, the conditions imposed.

If you already have a list of applications and keep hitting the wall of "decision: Refused" with no explanation, this is the piece that fills it in.

What you get

One record per application, with the document text as plain fields:

Field	What it holds
decisionNoticeText	Full text of the Decision Notice
officerReportText	Full text of the Officer Report
reference, council	Which application this is
portalUrl, documentsUrl	Where it came from, so you can check it
portalType	Which portal software the council runs
documents	Per document detail: type, filename, date, URL, how the text was extracted, page count, character count, and a plain English warning if a file could not yield text
status, note	What happened, in specific terms. See the status list below

You can also ask for Plans, Consultation responses and Supporting Documents instead of, or as well as, the two defaults.

Where a council has uploaded several versions of a document, the newest by document date is the one returned, so you do not get a superseded notice.

What you put in

Either of these, or both together:

• Application portal URLs. The most reliable option. Paste the council portal URL for each application. These chain straight from the portalUrl field of a UK planning applications actor.
• Council plus reference. For example {"council": "Cornwall", "reference": "PA26/00056"}, resolved through the free PlanIt API.

Other settings: which document types you want, whether to OCR scanned files, a cap on applications per run, and proxy configuration.

File types

• PDF with embedded text. Read directly.
• Scanned PDF with no text layer. OCR'd automatically when OCR is switched on. Older decisions are often scans, and this is how they get recovered.
• Word documents. Officer Reports are frequently .docx rather than PDF. Both are handled.
• Drawings and plans. These are image only by nature and produce no text. When that happens the record says so in the warning field rather than leaving you with an unexplained blank.

Statuses

Every application comes back with a specific status. There is no silent failure, and an empty result always says which kind of empty it is.

Status	What it means
ok	Text extracted
no_matching_documents	The application has documents, but none of the types you asked for. Very common on applications still awaiting a decision. The note lists what is actually there
no_documents_found	The portal genuinely lists no documents for this application
guest_access_denied	The portal was reached but refused to show its document list to an anonymous visitor. The contents are unknown. This is not a confirmation that there are no documents
extracted_empty	Documents were found and downloaded, but no text could be recovered. The per document warning says why
gateway_login_required	The council's portal sits behind a login and needs an account for that council
unsupported_portal	The council runs portal software this actor does not handle yet. The note names the system
not_found	A council and reference could not be matched to an application
error	A network or portal failure. The note carries the detail

What it costs

You are charged per document that actually comes back with text, never per application.

That distinction matters. Applications still waiting on a decision, portals that refuse anonymous access, drawings that contain no text, and network failures all cost you nothing. You pay for text you receive.

Documents in a single run	Price each
1 to 999	$0.050
1,000 to 1,999	$0.040
2,000 and above	$0.035

The discount is applied as you go, in the same way income tax bands work. A run returning 2,500 documents is charged 999 at $0.050, then 1,000 at $0.040, then 501 at $0.035, which comes to $107.49, or an effective rate of $0.043 per document.

Two things worth knowing. The bands count documents within one run, so a single large run is cheaper than the same volume split across many small ones. And a typical application yields two documents, the Decision Notice and the Officer Report, so 1,000 applications usually means around 2,000 documents.

Council coverage

Five portal systems are supported, which together account for roughly 85% of UK planning authorities. That figure was measured against a live sample of 55 authorities, not estimated.

• Idox Public Access, the most common system by a wide margin, on all of its URL variants
• Agile Applications
• DEF Planning Register, including the shared planning-register.co.uk sites
• Civica and Idox Publisher
• Salesforce Experience Cloud, the Arcus planning register

Councils on other systems, such as Northgate M3 and Ocella, are recognised and reported as unsupported_portal with the system named, so you always know why an application produced nothing. Adapters for those can be added on request.

Honest limits

• Coverage is counted by authority. Idox is more common in large cities, so coverage by application volume is higher than 85%, but no single council is guaranteed until it has been run.
• Around 15 councils have been tested end to end so far. A supported system means the software is handled, not that every council on it has been individually verified.
• A small number of councils block automated access at the network level regardless of proxy. Those return error with the detail.
• Some councils, such as Central Bedfordshire, sit behind a portal login. Those return gateway_login_required and need an account for that council.
• Committee reports, as opposed to delegated officer reports, have not been specifically tested yet.

Practical notes

• Council portals often block datacenter IP addresses. Residential proxy is strongly recommended and is the default.
• Each application runs in its own isolated session, so one bad proxy exit or one flaky council cannot spoil the rest of the run.
• Long Officer Reports are genuinely long. Reports over 200,000 characters have been returned intact.