An application page tells you who applied and who acted as agent. It never told you what else they were doing. That took a name, a notepad, and a search of every council register you could think of.
Now the names are clickable. Click an applicant, an agent, or a case officer on any application and a panel opens with the applications we hold for them across the councils we monitor.
Who they are, and how much they're doing
The top of the panel names the company, links to its website, and shows its logo where we've verified one. Under that, three numbers: homes waiting on a decision, approval rate, and how many applications we hold.
The pipeline tile reads "412 or more" rather than "412" whenever some of the undecided applications don't publish a homes count. The approval rate only appears once there's at least one approval to divide by, and it says which month we hold records from, so a firm we've only tracked since March isn't presented as a lifetime record.
The category mix
A donut of what they actually do, using the same categories and colours as the rest of the site. It answers a question a list can't: is this a housebuilder, a shopfitter, or a firm that mostly does extensions.
- New homes 28
- Extensions 16
- Change of use 10
- Commercial and major works 6
- Trees and landscaping 4
Their applications, and where they are
The list runs newest first, each one showing the address, what's proposed, whether it's been decided, and the number of homes where we have it. Alongside it, the same applications as pins, so a firm working one town looks different at a glance from one working nationally.
One company, spelled three ways
Council registers are typed by hand, so the same firm turns up as "Drew Planning & Development Ltd", "Drew Planning and Development Limited", and "DREW PLANNING & DEVELOPMENT". Matching a name literally would split one company into three, each looking smaller than it is.
So we match on a normalised version of the name and show whichever spelling that company uses most often. Joint applications work in both directions too: where a register records "Barratt Homes and David Wilson Homes" in one field, clicking either name also brings in the applications that party filed alone.
Case officers are the exception. They're matched exactly, because they're individuals at one council rather than brands, and loose matching would merge two officers who happen to share a surname.
What the pipeline number counts
It's homes still waiting on a decision, from the dwelling counts we pull out of application descriptions.
Screening opinions, scoping opinions, and pre-application advice are left out. They quote a scheme's size without being the application for it, so including them would count the same 200 homes twice and make a developer's pipeline look bigger than it is.
Some councils share a planning service and publish the same application on two or three registers. We collapse those to one, so a firm working in Cambridge doesn't appear to be doing three times the work.
What it doesn't claim
Not every application carries applicant and agent fields. Councils publish different amounts, and some publish none. So the panel says what we hold rather than what exists, and the numbers are a floor: a company may well have more applications than we can show, never fewer.
Where to find it
On any application page with detail, on the applicant, agent, and case officer names. It's part of the Starter plan at £49 a month, which also includes 20,000 API calls, and it works with the account you already sign into.