PlanningScout reads thousands of council decision notices every week so you don't have to. Every Monday morning you receive a scored, ranked shortlist of leads matched to your practice - complete with the exact phrases that make each case worth pursuing.
We do the monitoring, reading, and scoring. You focus on making the calls and winning the work.
Every week, PlanningScout automatically searches the planning registers of 44+ UK councils — covering Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, London, the South East, Midlands and more. Every application that could match your brief is captured and processed.
For each application, PlanningScout opens the decision notice and any other relevant documents — then scans for the exact trigger phrases, keywords, and signals that define a good lead for your practice. Refused applications, approved ones, or both. Whatever your brief says.
A scored, ranked digest of that week's best matches — with application reference, location, use class, description, and the trigger phrases found. Direct link to the council portal. Ready on your desk at the start of the working week.
PlanningScout monitors the full planning register — not just refusals, not just approvals. Whether you're looking for appeals to win, new major applications that need a specialist consultant, prior approval opportunities, or market intelligence on a particular area — the system is configured around what you actually need.
After an onboarding call where we understand exactly how your practice finds work today, we configure your monitoring brief precisely — the councils, keywords, decision types, trigger phrases, and scoring thresholds that define a qualified lead for you.
Sequential test failures, lack of evidence, out-of-centre refusals — cases where a well-prepared appeal has a strong chance of success. We find them before anyone else calls the client.
Large or complex applications in your sector — transport, viability, heritage, ecology — where a specialist consultant hasn't yet been appointed. Get in early.
Office-to-residential and agricultural conversions — new applications and refused prior approvals with appeal potential. High volume, repeatable work.
Monitor planning activity near a client's land, track applications in a target sector, or watch competitor sites for development signals. Intelligence that shapes strategy.
Each lead in your weekly digest is pre-read, pre-scored, and pre-qualified. A quick go/no-go decision without opening a single portal.
Planning portals show you a title. PlanningScout reads the documents — every decision notice, every reason for refusal, every specialist requirement buried in the applications. That's where the real leads are, and that's what most consultancies are missing every single week.
Below are example keyword sets for the most common practice areas we configure. Your actual brief is built with you — these are starting points, not constraints.
We've essentially automated our lead generation. PlanningScout pays for itself many times over with just a single instruction. If you are still manually monitoring council portals, you are losing money. It’s that simple.
Start with a full month free — no credit card, no commitment. See real leads from your target councils before you spend a penny. If it works for you, continue at £149/month.
At £149/month, you break even with a single instruction — which most clients find within their first week.
You get one full month free with no credit card required. We start with an onboarding call, configure your brief, run the first scan, and send you a real digest within a week. After the month, choose to continue at £149/month or simply walk away. There's no cancellation process, no awkward conversation, and nothing to cancel if you never subscribed in the first place.
Your brief is fully adjustable — that's exactly what the onboarding call is for. If after your first digest the leads aren't hitting the mark, just tell us what's wrong: too broad, wrong use class, wrong region, wrong decision type. We'll refine the keywords and thresholds within 48 hours. The trial period exists precisely so you can assess quality and calibrate before you commit.
No. PlanningScout can be configured for any planning intelligence need — new major applications where you can offer specialist consultancy, prior approval monitoring, site-specific watching, or market intelligence in a target sector. We configure the system around what you actually do.
44+ councils across England — Greater Manchester (including Tameside, Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, Trafford, Oldham), West Yorkshire (Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield, Calderdale, Wigan), London boroughs, South East, East Midlands, West Midlands, East of England, South West, and North East. We're adding more councils regularly. If a council you need isn't covered yet, let us know — we prioritise by demand.
Each application is scored based on how strongly it matches your brief. For appeal leads, the score weights the strength of the refusal grounds — "lack of evidence" refusals score highest (easiest wins on appeal), sequential test failures score strongly, and generic boilerplate citations score low. The scoring logic is fully configurable per client. Applications below your minimum threshold are never shown to you.
Entirely from public UK planning portals — the same pages any member of the public can access. Application details, decision notices, and agent names are all publicly available. We read and process that data automatically, at scale, every week. No private data systems, no GDPR concerns around what we provide to you.
A formatted email every Monday morning, plus a live Google Sheet updated weekly with your full lead history. The sheet is searchable, sortable, and has a column for your own notes and status tracking. High-score matches also trigger an immediate email alert so nothing urgent waits until Monday.
Yes — your brief is a living configuration. If you expand into new sectors, want to add councils, or want to refine your trigger set based on what's coming through, just let us know. We update it within 48 hours and it takes effect on the next weekly run.
In line with GDPR best practice, we don't include applicant names or personal contact information in your digest. We do include agent details and a direct link to the public portal page — where the full application, including any agent and applicant contact information, is publicly accessible and updated by the council.
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