What is a watch?
A check tells you what's true right now. A watch tells you when that changes — it's the part of Planning Constraints that keeps working while you're not looking.
What you can watch
From the Watches section of the app, you can set up standing monitoring for:
- A ward or a local planning authority — get told about planning applications submitted, decided or updated in that area, filtered by application type, status and size.
- A radius around a point — the same application monitoring, drawn as a circle rather than an administrative boundary.
- A drawn area — a boundary you've sketched yourself.
- A postcode district (outward code), for ownership changes — hear about it when a company acquires or disposes of land registry titles in that district, and optionally about company filings (charges, strike-offs) for companies buying there. See Understanding ownership data for what this data does and doesn't include.
- A local plan's lifecycle — the lowest-friction watch in the product: just a council name, no point or boundary needed. Alerts when a new document is published (a draft allocation, a consultation document, an adoption statement).
- A saved site — turned on from the site itself; see Saving sites.
How watches are checked
Different feeds run on different cadences, because the underlying data publishes at different speeds:
| Watch kind | Checked | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Ward / authority / radius / drawn area (planning applications) | Daily | PlanIt |
| Parcel splits (opt-in, on by default on an area watch) | Monthly | HM Land Registry INSPIRE index, first Sunday of the month |
| Postcode district (ownership changes) | Monthly | HM Land Registry CCOD/OCOD |
| Postcode district (company filings, optional) | Daily, on a rolling rota | Companies House |
| Local plan lifecycle | Weekly | planning.data.gov.uk |
A watch never replays history — alerts start from the moment you create it, never from anything that happened before.
Health, honestly
Every watch shows its own health, not just its content:
- Checked [date] — the last check ran successfully.
- Monitoring degraded (amber) — the feed hasn't completed its last two checks (or, for a monthly feed like ownership, missed its one monthly drop). This is shown deliberately, because a watch gone quiet must never be read as "nothing's changed" when the truth is "we haven't been able to check."
- Awaiting first check — created, but not yet run.
- Paused — switched off by you.
This is the same principle as a failed constraint source rendering Partial rather than Clear (see Reading your results) — applied to time instead of to a single check.
Next
- How do I monitor a site for changes? walks through setting one up.