Plota updates

A new home for your alerts

If you'd set up alerts on Plota before today, you managed them on a simple list page. It worked, but it wasn't great. You couldn't see what had changed, you couldn't browse the applications matching an alert without leaving the page, and on mobile it felt cramped. We've rebuilt the whole thing.

Meet the new My areas dashboard. One screen for every alert you've set up, with three tabs per alert - Overview, Applications, and Settings - and a sidebar that lets you switch between them in a click. Access it from the Manage your alerts link in any digest email — you need a signed-in session, so the URL on its own isn't enough.

Overview: see what's happening at a glance

The Overview tab is the new front door. Across the top you get the numbers that matter - new applications since your last visit, applications this week, when the next email is going out, and the alert's overall health status.

Below that, a map of your alert area, a What changed this week breakdown by category, and an Application mix view showing the share of new homes, extensions, listed buildings, trees, and so on. Click any of those rows and you jump straight to the matching applications.

Applications: filter, sort, and see them on the map

The Applications tab is where you actually browse what's been picked up. A full table on the left with sortable columns, a side map on the right showing where each application sits inside your alert area, and a Filter button that opens up the same 15 categories used everywhere else on Plota.

Search by address, sort by date, switch between split and list view, and export the filtered set as a CSV - useful if you want to share what's been happening with a neighbour or a planning consultant.

Settings

The Settings tab manages everything about the alert itself - frequency, day, time, area, tree filter, name.

Pause an alert if you're going on holiday, change the day or time it lands in your inbox, switch to fortnightly digests, or duplicate an alert as a starting point for a new one. Editing the area itself - whether it's a postcode radius, a council, or a custom drawn boundary - is one click away.

Behind the scenes

A few less-visible improvements shipped at the same time. Page-to-page navigation inside the dashboard is now a single-page app, so clicking between tabs doesn't reload anything or jump the scroll. And every email's CTA now lands you on a pre-filtered Applications tab showing exactly the apps that were in your inbox, with pins on the map for each one.

It's at /my-areas from any link or email - the old /manage URL still works and forwards you over.

Filter applications by type

You can now filter planning applications by what they actually are. New homes, extensions, change of use, commercial and major works, listed buildings, trees and landscaping, solar and renewables, telecoms masts, demolition, agricultural, signs and adverts, community, utility infrastructure, and shopfronts. Fourteen categories in total.

It sounds like a simple feature. Or at least, it does until you try to get it to a standard you're happy with.

Council planning data is unstandardised. Every authority writes application descriptions differently, with different abbreviations, formatting, and conventions. A single application can cover several types at once, like a demolition combined with a new build, or a change of use bundled with an extension. On top of that, councils log thousands of administrative notices, procedural updates, and document submissions that look like applications but aren't really what people are searching for.

We started somewhere around 90% accuracy and refused to ship. Every additional percentage point was a challenge. Borderline applications, mixed-type proposals, ambiguous wording, council-specific quirks. We rebuilt the system several times before we were happy with it.

Today we're at over 99% accuracy across our full database of new applications. The small number that don't get a category are usually council-side issues, like an entry with no description, or a procedural notice that genuinely isn't an application. We'd rather take longer to get it right than launch something that quietly hides applications you'd want to see.

Powerful, but friendly

On the homepage, tap the type pill before you search to narrow your results from the start. On any council, town, postcode, or search page, tap Filter to choose one or more categories and the map and list update instantly.

Active filters show as chips next to the button so you always know what you're looking at, and the URL updates too, so you can bookmark or share a filtered view.

It plugs into alerts as well. If you only want new homes inside your drawn boundary, or just listed building consents in a town you care about, that's now one tap away.

Planning Authority Score

Every application page now shows a Planning Authority Score for the council handling it. It's a single number out of 10 that tells you how the council actually performs - not what they claim, but what the government data shows.

The score is calculated from the most recent MHCLG PS2 dataset, which covers every English local planning authority. We rank each council on three factors:

• Approval rate - what percentage of householder applications get approved
• Decision speed - what percentage are decided within the statutory 8 weeks
• Time extensions - how often the council extends the deadline beyond the standard time limit

Below the score, you'll see a plain-English summary of what to expect. Here's Fareham - one of the top-performing councils in England:

And here's Wiltshire, which scores significantly lower. The council extends the time limit on 56% of applications - one of the highest rates in England:

Each scorecard includes sparkline trends across four quarters, national average comparisons, and breakdowns for householder, minor dwellings, major dwellings, and change of use applications.

Draw your own alert area

Most planning alert services give you a postcode and a fixed radius. That works if your life fits neatly inside a circle, but it usually doesn't. You might want to watch a specific neighbourhood, one side of a road, or two separate areas at once.

Plota lets you draw your exact area on the map. Paint the hexagons you care about, skip the ones you don't, and we'll email you when new planning applications appear inside your boundary.

How it works

Search for a place or zoom into the map, then click Draw area. You'll see a grid of hexagons overlaid on the map. Click or drag to paint them, use the eraser to remove any you don't want, and hit Done when you're happy.

Need to cover a bigger area? Zoom out and use scribble mode - draw a rough outline and we'll fill it with hexagons automatically. You can even draw multiple separate areas in a single alert.

Once you're done, enter your email and choose daily, weekly, or fortnightly alerts. You'll see a preview of your area and can edit it any time from the My Areas page.

Why hexagons?

Your drawn area is stored as a set of H3 hexagonal cells - the same spatial grid system used by Uber for surge pricing and Meta for location features. Hexagons tile uniformly (unlike squares, which distort at different latitudes), so your boundary is precise and consistent everywhere in the UK.

Daily and weekly email alerts

Set up an alert for any area and we'll send you a digest of new planning applications, daily, weekly, or fortnightly. Each email includes the application reference, address, description, and a direct link to the full details on Plota or the council's own portal.

You can filter out tree applications if you only care about building work, and manage all your alerts from one page. One-click unsubscribe in every email.