CON29 is the standard local authority search used in UK conveyancing. It checks the local authority's land charges register and planning database. On a straightforward suburban purchase, it is usually sufficient. On a high-value rural acquisition, it consistently fails to surface the most material planning risks. Here is what it misses and why.
A CON29 search is submitted to the local authority and returns information from two sources: the local land charges register (Part I) and responses to specific enquiries about the property (Part II). The planning enquiries in Part II ask about enforcement notices, stop notices, listed building consent, conservation area designations, planning agreements, and a number of other specific categories.
What CON29 does not check: withdrawn planning applications, applications that have been refused and then submitted in modified form, informal pre-application advice, pre-merger enforcement records, planning history that predates current portal systems, and Land Registry title constraints that sit outside the planning register entirely.
A planning application that is withdrawn before the local authority reaches a decision does not result in a formal refusal. It does not appear on a CON29 return. It may or may not appear in a standard portal search, depending on the council's system. But a withdrawn application — particularly a withdrawn CLEUD application — is often the most revealing intelligence on a rural property.
When local authorities were reorganised, merged or restructured, their planning records were not always fully transferred to successor authority systems. The CON29 is submitted to the current local authority. It does not systematically retrieve records held by predecessor authorities in separate legacy systems.
For rural properties in areas that have undergone authority reorganisation — which includes a significant proportion of rural England and virtually all of Wales — the CON29 may return a clean result on a property that has substantive enforcement history, planning conditions or application history in the predecessor authority's records. We retrieve those records directly.
The CON29 Local Authority search queries the local authority. The local authority's response is limited to what its own systems can produce. In authorities running on Civica Portal 360 — which blocks all automated access at DNS level — and in National Park Authorities with independent systems, the planning record that is accessible to the council's search team is often not the full record. Legacy applications, PDF-archived committee minutes and pre-portal enforcement files may not be included in what the CON29 process returns.
This is not a failing of the CON29 process — it is a structural limitation of what local authority systems can retrieve on request. We query the live database directly and retrieve the full record, including materials that the standard CON29 process would not produce even if the local authority was fully cooperative.
The most significant category of risk that CON29 cannot surface is also the least discussed: Land Registry title constraints. Restrictive covenants, Secretary of State conditions attached to grant-aided works, National Trust designations, overage agreements, ransom strip arrangements and access rights all sit in the title register. They are material to acquisition decisions. They do not appear in any planning search.
A Planning Decoder acquisition report is designed to fill the specific gaps that CON29 leaves open on rural and high-value property. It retrieves withdrawn applications, pre-merger enforcement records, portal-blocked planning history, and Land Registry title constraints — the categories that the conveyancing search process cannot reliably surface, and that are disproportionately material on the property types that buying agents are advising on.
It is not a replacement for CON29 — it is the intelligence that CON29 cannot return. At £149–249, it costs less than one hour of most buying agents' time. It takes 48 hours to deliver. The scope is agreed before any payment.
Withdrawn applications, pre-merger enforcement records, portal-blocked history and title constraints. Delivered in 48 hours before your client commits.
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