Terms of Service & Fair Use

Last Updated: July 2026

By accessing the Appeal Scout archive or purchasing a Professional Subscription, you agree to the following terms and conditions. If you do not agree with any part of these terms, please do not use our services.

1. Nature of Service

Appeal Scout is an independent research tool. We provide a searchable index of historical planning appeal decisions sourced from the Planning Inspectorate (PINS) under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Informational Purposes Only: We are not qualified legal advisors. The information provided, including "Success Rate Insights" and "Inspector Analysis," does not constitute professional planning or legal advice. Citing a precedent found on this site does not guarantee that your appeal will be successful.

2. Access & Subscriptions

• Householder Appeals: Full decision text for Householder (HAS) appeals is available to everyone, free of charge, with no account required.
• Free Account: Signing up for a free account additionally unlocks success-rate insights, inspector analysis, and PDF downloads across any appeal type, at no cost.
• Professional Subscription (£50/month): Provides full access to Case IDs, site addresses, full decision text, and PDF downloads across every appeal type. This subscription renews automatically unless cancelled via your Account Dashboard.
• Refund Policy: Due to the digital nature of our archive, we generally do not offer refunds once data has been accessed or PDFs have been downloaded.

3. Fair Use Policy (PDF Downloads)

To ensure high performance for all users and to protect the integrity of our archive, we operate a Fair Use Policy regarding the download of PDF Decision Notices.

• Human Use Only: Access is strictly for individual researchers, homeowners, and planning professionals.
• Prohibition of Automated Scraping: You are strictly prohibited from using any automated systems, bots, or scripts to harvest data or bulk-download PDFs from this archive.
• Download Monitoring: While we offer "unlimited" access for genuine project research, accounts that download an unusually high volume of documents (e.g., more than 50 PDFs in a 24-hour period) may be flagged for review or temporary suspension.

4. Intellectual Property

The text and PDFs in our archive contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. You are permitted to use this information for your own professional appeal statements, provided you acknowledge the source.

The "Appeal Scout" branding, search algorithms, geocoding data, and custom development descriptions are the exclusive intellectual property of Appeal Scout.

5. Limitation of Liability

Appeal Scout shall not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of the archive or your reliance on the data provided. Use of the archive is at your own risk.