How Many Plumbing Jobs Are Sitting in Your Council's Planning Portal Right Now?

Open your council's planning portal in a browser tab and run a search for householder applications decided in the last month. Go on - it is free, it is public, and it takes about two minutes. The number that comes back is the point of this whole post.

For a typical UK council it will be somewhere north of forty approved householder applications in a single month. Extensions, loft conversions, conservatories - the exact jobs that need first-fix and second-fix plumbing, new radiators, an en-suite, a boiler that can cope with an extra bathroom. Across England, councils granted around 159,600 householder applications in the year to June 2025, roughly 90% of everything submitted. That works out at about 480 approved jobs per council area, every year. Right now, this week, a stack of them is sitting in the portal covering your patch.

And almost no plumbers ever open it.

Why Nobody Looks

It is not a secret list. Every local planning authority in the UK is legally required to publish its applications and decisions on a public register, and nearly all of them do it online. Most run the Idox "Public Access" system, which has a weekly and monthly list search built in - you can pull every application validated or decided in a given week in a couple of clicks. Scotland runs its own ePlanning portal. None of it is behind a login.

The reason plumbers do not use it is duller than a conspiracy: it is a bit boring and a bit fiddly. The search interfaces are clunky, every council's portal looks slightly different, and once you have the list you still have to read through it and bin the applications that do not mean plumbing - the fence, the tree works, the change of shopfront. Do that every week and it becomes a chore. Skip it for a fortnight and you never go back.

So the list just sits there. Approved, public, and ignored.

Why These Are the Best Leads in the Trade

Here is the honest opinion I will put my name to: paying for shared leads off Checkatrade or a lead-gen site is one of the worst ways a plumber can spend money, and planning applications are the best-value lead source almost nobody is using. Not because the shared-lead sites are scams - because of who gets there first.

A shared lead is a race. The enquiry gets sold to four plumbers at once and whoever rings back fastest wins, on price, while the customer compares three quotes. A planning application is the opposite. The homeowner who has just had an extension approved is at the very start of a months-long project. They are not panicking, they are planning - and crucially, they have not phoned round for a plumber yet, because the builder has not broken ground. Reach them at that moment with a straightforward letter and you are not the fifth plumber they have spoken to. You are the first, and often the only one. There is no bidding war because nobody else showed up.

That is the whole game. Warm, high-value, low-competition work, and the only reason it stays low-competition is that pulling the list by hand is a faff most plumbers cannot be bothered with.

What the Best Plumbers Do Instead

The plumbers who have cottoned on do not sit down every Sunday to trawl council websites. They have a system that watches the portals for them, filters the approvals down to the ones that actually mean plumbing work, and hands them a short list each week with a letter template ready to personalise and post in ten minutes. The outreach runs in the background while they are on the tools. If you want to see the manual version first, our guide on how to find plumbing jobs on council planning portals walks through it step by step, and planning application leads: the source most UK plumbers miss covers what they are worth over a year.

That automated version is exactly what we are building with Planning Leads - it monitors UK council planning portals, filters every application for plumbing relevance, and sends a weekly digest of approved extensions and loft conversions in your postcode area, each with a letter template included. Scottish planning data first, then England and Wales. It removes the only reason this lane has stayed empty: the hassle of gathering the list yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I search my council's planning portal for approved jobs?

Find your council's planning pages and look for "Public Access", "planning application search", or "weekly lists". Most run the Idox system, which lets you filter by decided applications in a given week or month. Set the type to householder and the decision to granted, and you will see the approved extensions and conversions in your area.

Is it legal to contact homeowners from planning data?

Sending a physical letter to a property address about a service relevant to their approved project is standard business outreach and the data is public. Keep it to a genuine, relevant letter rather than spam and you are on solid ground. Avoid cold emails and texts, which fall under different marketing rules.

How many of these leads turn into work?

Response rates on well-targeted physical mail are low in percentage terms, but the job values are high, so even a handful of replies a year pays for itself many times over. Two jobs a month from planning outreach is a sensible target once you are running it consistently.

Planning application outreach is still genuinely uncommon. The lane is wide open. Most plumbers who hear about it say "that's a good idea" and do nothing. The ones who act now will have a running head start on every other plumber in their area by the time this becomes common practice - and it will. We are building the automated version so you do not have to do it manually. Join the waitlist and be among the first to use it when it launches: plumberproai.co.uk/planning-leads

Written by Alexander McVicar