The Patch List
Two different sets of people appear in this notice: the trades who subscribe to us, and the households whose planning approvals appear in the lists we compile. The second half is the part that matters most, so it comes first.
If you have had planning permission granted and you don't want your property to appear in our lists, email optout@thepatchlist.com with the address or the council's application reference. We will remove it within five working days and keep the address on a suppression list so it does not reappear. You do not have to give a reason and we will not ask for one.
The Patch List compiles lists of approved planning applications from the public registers kept by UK local planning authorities, and supplies those lists to construction trades on subscription. We are the data controller for the processing described here.
Contact: hello@thepatchlist.com. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office.
Every local planning authority in the UK is required to keep a register of planning applications and decisions and to make it publicly available. Authorities publish these registers on their own websites. We collect from those registers, either directly or through aggregators of the same public data, and reformat them.
For each approved application we hold: the site address and postcode, the authority's own application reference, the description of the proposed work as written by the authority, the decision date, the application type and decision status, and a link back to the authority's record.
We do not collect or supply applicant or occupier names. We do not collect telephone numbers or email addresses for the properties on our lists, and we do not attempt to look them up. A site address can still identify the people who live there, so we treat this information as personal data and apply this notice to it.
Our lawful basis is legitimate interests — Article 6(1)(f) of the UK GDPR. The interests are ours and our subscribers': local trades finding customers for work that has just been given permission, and householders who have just received permission hearing from trades who do that work in their area. We have carried out and documented a legitimate interests assessment, and we will provide a summary of it on request.
Each list goes to a single subscribing business per trade, per council area. We do not sell, rent or licence these lists to data brokers, marketing agencies or anyone else, and we do not publish them.
Subscribers agree, as a condition of their subscription, to use the information only for their own postal marketing about their own services, not to pass it on, and to stop contacting any address that asks them to.
Twelve months from the decision date, after which the record is deleted. Suppression records — addresses that have asked not to appear — are kept indefinitely, because that is the only way to honour the request.
Where personal data is not obtained from the individual, the UK GDPR expects us to inform them within a month or at the first communication, unless doing so would take disproportionate effort. We rely on that exemption: we hold no names, no email addresses and no phone numbers, so writing to every household individually would mean creating contact records we have deliberately chosen not to create. Instead we publish this notice, we require subscribers to name us as the source in their mailings, and we operate the opt-out above.
You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about your property, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to the processing. Because we process on the basis of legitimate interests, you have the right to object at any time and we will stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your interests — for marketing purposes, we will simply stop. Email optout@thepatchlist.com.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or call their helpline on 0303 123 1113. We would rather you told us first, but you do not have to.
If you subscribe, request a sample or contact us, we hold your name, business name, email address, phone number if you give it, the council and trade you asked about, and our correspondence with you.
| What for | Lawful basis | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
| Providing the service you pay for | Contract | Duration of subscription, then 12 months |
| Replying to an enquiry or sending a sample | Legitimate interests | 12 months from last contact |
| Accounting and tax records | Legal obligation | 6 years |
| Emailing you about the service | Legitimate interests, with an unsubscribe link on every message | Until you unsubscribe |
Payments are handled by our payment provider; we never see or store your card details. We use email and hosting providers who process data on our behalf under contract. We do not sell your details to anyone.
This site sets no advertising or tracking cookies. The request form on the home page opens your own email application — nothing you type into it is stored by this website. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs, including IP addresses, for security and for a short period only.
The site loads typefaces from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google's servers when you open a page.
If we change how any of this works we will update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes to how we handle planning register data will be flagged here for at least three months.