My name is Daniel Kerr. For eight years I worked as a planning consultant out of Leeds, helping homeowners, developers and small practices navigate the UK planning system. I loved the work — but there was one thing that drove me quietly mad every single week: getting hold of a compliant site location plan.
The process was absurd. Phone a supplier. Wait for a quote. Chase the quote. Pay. Wait again for the PDF to arrive by email — sometimes the same afternoon, sometimes two days later. Meanwhile, the client is chasing you and the council portal is open in another tab.
One Tuesday in October 2023, I had three applications on my desk at the same time. I needed three different site location plans, different scales, different postcodes. I spent the better part of three hours on the phone and email just trying to get the maps I needed. Three hours — for something that should take three minutes.
That evening I started building. I had some development experience from side projects over the years and I knew that Ordnance Survey had opened up their data licensing for exactly this kind of use case. The technical pieces were there. No one had just… assembled them properly.
Six months later, PlanningMapsUK went live. The idea was simple: search your address, draw your boundary, choose your scale, pay, download. Done in under two minutes. Council-compliant OS MasterMap data, proper licensing, instant PDF. Everything a planning officer expects to see.
Today, we're still intentionally a small local business. No bloated team. No layers of account managers. Just experienced people focused on mapping and planning compliance. That lean structure keeps overheads low and allows us to offer fair, transparent pricing.
The service is fully digitised end to end: instant quoting, live boundary tools, clear scale options, and immediate downloads. No email ping-pong and no hidden process.
We also stand behind every map we generate. If your application is challenged by a planning officer due to a map issue on our side, we will correct it free of charge.