Article 4 Directions

An Article 4 direction is how a local planning authority removes permitted-development rights over a defined area, so works that would normally be automatic (an extension, new cladding, replacement windows, an HMO conversion, a demolition) instead need a planning application. This dataset holds 17,666 of those extents across England, each a full EPSG:4326 polygon ready to map and run point-in-polygon checks against.

Only about a third of England's planning authorities have published their Article 4 boundaries to the national data platform, and the platform itself warns its coverage is incomplete. The rest are made authority by authority and live in council GIS services, order documents and scanned maps. We build the missing majority. 6,959 extents come straight from the national platform; we resolve the other 10,707 ourselves, by reading council endpoints, matching directions to their conservation-area boundaries, geocoding enumerated property schedules, and tracing order-document maps where nothing else exists. Every extent records how its geometry was derived and how confident that derivation is.

Where the source provides them, each extent carries the GPDO class codes it removes, so you can tell an agricultural-land direction from one that controls shopfronts or house extensions. Every record is stamped with its resolver tier, source URL and licence. The national tier and most council sources are Open Government Licence v3.0; a minority of councils publish under their own terms, which are flagged per record and kept out of commercial redistribution.

Coverage is England only. The General Permitted Development Order is England-specific, and devolved equivalents are separate instruments. Use it for planning constraint checks, site due diligence and mortgage screening, alongside conservation areas, listed buildings and other planning constraints in the same model.