Planning Appeal Search Tips

You have our powerful search tool at your fingertips and with skilled searching you can find anything. Here are some useful tips:

  1. Put in a date range. Simply select the date box and put in your chosen dates. Otherwise the default is the last 5 years.
  2. Use double inverted commas around your search term, eg. "80 dwellings" finds 80 dwellings whereas 80 dwellings (without inverted commas) finds 80 and dwellings, like NPPF paragraph 80 in an appeal of 2 dwellings.
  3. The search looks throughout the Decision Notice - the headers, the text including various descriptions of the development, the Inspector's reasoning, comments, planning conditions, footnotes, everything.
  4. If you search for a particular appeal reference number you will also get other appeals which cross-refer to it in their footnotes.
  5. For maximum effectiveness, combine search terms with outcome (eg. Allowed), authority, date range, etc.
  6. If your search does not find the appeal you were looking for, consider variations the Inspector may have used, for example "brownfield land" instead of "previously developed land".
  7. Ensure correct spelling. For example, "rear conservitory" will  not return any results due to the spelling error.
  8. The search allows interchange of singular/plural words. For example, "wind farm" will find "wind farms" and "sustainable development" will find "sustainable developments".
  9. Longer phrases can help narrow the search, for example "conflicts with the development plan when read as a whole" will find appeals with that exact phrase.
  10. Sometimes it can be helpful to search for negatives, for example "no cycle provision" and "not enough space".
  11. To exclude documents containing a particular word, use the minus sign (-) for example windfarm -offshore will find windfarms, but exclude documents containing the word "offshore".  (Be careful - for example, an onshore windfarm development may legitmately mention an offshore windfarm nearby and be excluded from the results.)
  12. If it matters to you which version of the NPPF was applicable, set your date range accordingly. The various NPPF updates occured on 24 July 2018, 19 February 2019, 20 July 2021, 5 September 2023 and 19 December 2023.
  13. Where a Decision is written by 2 individuals, namely an appeal planning officer assisting a more senior Inspector, they are indexed under the Inspector as the formal decision maker. To find appeals by a named appeal planning officer, put their name into the Keyword search rather than into the Inspector search.
  14. Results are often presented with dots between the words, eg. "sustainable... ...development". Don't be put off by this as you will find the appeal documents contain the phrase "sustainable development" without any gaps.
  15. A maximum of 150 documents will be returned.  There is no paging of results. The filters will help you narrow down searches, and you can add more relevant words to the search.
  16. Our mapping software displays all appeals that have a postcode. The majority of appeal addresses include a postcode, however the few that do not have a postcode entered by PINS cannot be displayed on the map. Advice on searches using the Appeals Map can be found on our blog here.
  17. See the FAQs section 2 for Appeal Searching FAQs such as finding Welsh appeals, former LPAs, etc and section 3 for Website Navigation FAQs for links to useful government data.