Methodology — Planning & Permits Finder

The problem

Businesses and property owners lose time finding the right open planning, building-control and licence data for their area. That data exists on data.gov.uk but is scattered and hard to search.

What this tool does

• Queries the open, no-auth data.gov.uk CKAN Search API for planning/permit datasets matching a keyword.
• Deterministically classifies each result into a sector bucket (keyword match — no machine learning).
• Links to the official dataset / publisher page.

Data source & honesty

Results are fetched live from https://www.data.gov.uk/api/3/action/package_search at request time. If unavailable, the tool shows an honest "source unavailable" message — it never fabricates results. Economic impact is unquantified until measured usage data exists.

Calculation

Sector classification: title + description lower-cased and tested against fixed keyword lists per sector. No scoring model, no LLM.