Last updated: 30th August 2026
These terms of service govern your use of Plan Archive at planarchive.co.uk, including any content, functionality and services offered on or through it.
By accessing or using Plan Archive you agree to be bound by these terms. If you do not agree to them, please do not use the service.
We may revise these terms from time to time. Where changes are material we will give notice by email to registered users or by a notice on the site. Continued use after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.
Plan Archive is a search and reference tool for planning appeal decisions issued by the Planning Inspectorate in England and Wales. It allows you to search, filter and read published appeal decisions, together with summaries and structured information derived from those decisions.
Plan Archive is a research tool. It is not a substitute for professional advice, and using it does not create any professional relationship between you and us.
Nothing on Plan Archive constitutes legal advice, planning advice, or any other form of professional advice. We are not a firm of solicitors, planning consultants, or surveyors. You should obtain appropriate professional advice before making decisions about a planning application, appeal, or any other matter.
We do not represent you before the Planning Inspectorate, any local planning authority, or any court or tribunal.
We may add, change, suspend or withdraw features at any time. We will give reasonable notice before withdrawing a paid feature where it is practical to do so.
Some features require an account. When you register you agree to provide accurate information and to keep it up to date.
You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for all activity that takes place under your account. You must notify us promptly at support@planarchive.co.uk if you believe your account has been accessed without your authorisation.
Accounts are for individual use. You must not share your login credentials with others or allow multiple people to use a single account. Where a plan is priced per user, each individual requiring access needs their own account.
You must be at least 18 years old to create an account.
Certain features are available only under a paid subscription. Current plans and prices are shown on our pricing page. Prices are stated in pounds sterling and are inclusive or exclusive of VAT as indicated at the point of purchase.
Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period unless cancelled beforehand. By subscribing you authorise us to charge your chosen payment method on each renewal date until you cancel.
Payments are processed by a third-party payment provider. We do not store your full card details.
You may cancel your subscription at any time from your account settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and you retain access until then. We do not provide pro-rata refunds for part-periods unless required by law.
If you are a consumer within the meaning of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, you may have a right to cancel within 14 days of purchase. By accessing paid features during that period you may lose that right, and we will make this clear at the point of purchase.
We may change subscription prices. Existing subscribers will be given at least 30 days' notice by email before a price change takes effect, and may cancel before renewal if they do not wish to continue.
If a payment fails we may retry it and will notify you. If payment remains outstanding we may suspend access to paid features until the account is brought up to date.
You agree not to:
We may suspend or terminate access where we reasonably believe these terms have been breached.
Plan Archive draws on decision letters and casework data published by the Planning Inspectorate. While we take care in processing that material, we do not warrant that the information on Plan Archive is complete, accurate, current or free from error.
You should be aware in particular that:
Every decision on Plan Archive links to the original decision letter as published by the Planning Inspectorate. Where a matter is important, you must consult the original document. The original decision letter always takes precedence over anything shown on Plan Archive.
Parts of Plan Archive are produced using automated language processing. This includes decision summaries, the identification of main issues and findings, the extraction of policy references, and any comparative analysis across multiple decisions.
This content is generated automatically and is not reviewed by a qualified planning professional before publication. It may be incomplete, may misinterpret a decision, or may state something the inspector did not.
Automatically generated content is provided as a navigational aid to help you find and orient yourself within the source documents. It is not a substitute for reading the decision, and must not be relied upon as a statement of what an inspector decided.
Where we present a summary, finding or analysis, we cite the decision and paragraph it derives from so that you can verify it. You are responsible for carrying out that verification before relying on any of it.
If you find an error in generated content, we would be grateful if you would tell us at support@planarchive.co.uk.
Appeal decision letters and casework data are published by the Planning Inspectorate and are made available under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Crown copyright is acknowledged. Documents prepared by third parties and referred to within a decision remain the property of their respective owners.
The Plan Archive name and logo, the design and layout of the site, our software, and the structured data, summaries, tags and analysis we generate are owned by us or licensed to us, and are protected by copyright and database rights.
Subject to these terms and to your plan, you may access and use Plan Archive for your own or your organisation's professional purposes, including quoting short extracts in advice, submissions and reports, provided you attribute the source appropriately.
You may not extract or re-utilise a substantial part of the database, whether in one act or by repeated and systematic extraction of insubstantial parts.
Where the service allows you to upload documents, you retain ownership of them. You grant us a limited licence to store and process them for the purpose of providing the service to you. We will not use your uploaded documents to train models, and we will not disclose them to other users.
Our Privacy Policy explains what personal data we collect, how we use it, and the rights you have under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. By using Plan Archive you agree to the processing described in that policy.
Appeal decisions published by the Planning Inspectorate may contain personal data, including the names of appellants, agents and inspectors. That material is published by the Inspectorate in the public interest and we reproduce it as published. If you consider that personal data appearing on Plan Archive should not be shown, please contact us at support@planarchive.co.uk.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.
Subject to that:
If you are using Plan Archive in the course of a business, you accept that it is your responsibility to verify information before relying on it in professional work.
We aim to keep Plan Archive available at all times but we do not guarantee uninterrupted access. The service may be unavailable during maintenance, or as a result of matters outside our control including failures of hosting, network or third-party providers.
We may carry out maintenance without notice where it is urgent, and will try to give notice of planned maintenance where practical.
Plan Archive links to external websites, including the Planning Inspectorate, local planning authority portals and gov.uk. Those links are provided for convenience. We do not control those sites, are not responsible for their content or availability, and their inclusion does not imply endorsement.
You may link to any page on Plan Archive, provided you do so in a way that is fair and lawful and that does not damage our reputation or suggest an association or endorsement that does not exist.
You must not frame Plan Archive on another site, or present our content as your own. We reserve the right to withdraw permission to link without notice.
You may close your account at any time from your account settings, or by contacting support@planarchive.co.uk.
We may suspend or terminate your account where you breach these terms, where we are required to do so by law, or where we discontinue the service. Where we terminate without cause we will refund any prepaid amount covering the unused part of your subscription.
On termination your right to use the service ends immediately. We will delete or anonymise your account data in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Any provision of these terms which by its nature should survive termination will do so, including provisions relating to intellectual property, limitation of liability and governing law.
We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect the service and the data it holds. No online service can be guaranteed completely secure, and you use Plan Archive at your own risk.
You must not attempt to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of the service, or breach any security or authentication measure, without our prior written consent.
If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, please report it to support@planarchive.co.uk rather than disclosing it publicly, and allow us a reasonable opportunity to address it.
If any provision of these terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, that provision will be severed and the remaining provisions will continue in full force.
Our failure to enforce any provision does not amount to a waiver of that provision or of our right to enforce it later.
These terms and any dispute arising out of them are governed by the law of England and Wales.
The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, save that if you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom you may also bring proceedings in the courts of the part of the United Kingdom in which you live.
If you have any questions about these terms, or about Plan Archive generally, please contact us at support@planarchive.co.uk.
We aim to respond to all enquiries within five working days.
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