Approaching a homeowner about their application

What the register actually publishes

The site address, the description of the work, the dates and the status. What it does not publish is the homeowner’s telephone number or email address. Councils redact those before publication.

So anyone offering you homeowner contact details from planning data is either selling you something they obtained elsewhere, or something they should not have. Tradecue does not hold them, which is why its letters are addressed to the property.

Post is the route that works

Marketing by post does not need consent. Under UK GDPR you need a lawful basis to use somebody’s name and address, and legitimate interests is normally it — the ICO gives direct marketing as an example of a legitimate interest, provided the use is proportionate, has low privacy impact, and would not surprise the recipient.

A letter to a property about a planning application at that property is about as unsurprising as marketing gets. Keep it relevant to the work, make it easy to opt out, and do not keep writing to somebody who has asked you not to.

Email and text are a different regime

Electronic marketing falls under PECR as well as UK GDPR, and to an individual that generally means consent. An address you found on a planning document is not consent. This is the single most common way a small firm gets itself a complaint, and the fix is simply to use the post.

Sources

• ICO — direct marketing guidance
• ICO — when can we rely on legitimate interests?

General explanation, not legal or planning advice. Anything that turns on the detail of a particular site is worth a free phone call to the council’s planning department. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us.