The Intelligence Layer the Construction Industry Has Been Missing

What Is LeadLinka?

LeadLinka is a UK planning data intelligence platform. It collects, processes, and surfaces planning application data from every local authority across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, combining it into a single searchable system that business development professionals can use to find approved projects before they appear on the open market.

Planning data in the UK is public information. Every council publishes it. The problem is that it exists in hundreds of separate portals, each with different formats, different search tools, and no connection to one another. LeadLinka solves that fragmentation by acting as the aggregation and intelligence layer on top of all of it.

The Problem LeadLinka Solves

How Business Development Works Today

Most companies that win work through procurement use one or more of the established third-party bidding platforms to find new opportunities. These platforms aggregate contracts and tenders that clients have published, allowing suppliers to submit bids.

This model has a fundamental structural problem: by the time a project appears on one of these platforms, it is already public, already attracting bids from every competitor who uses the same service, and often already in an advanced stage of procurement. The first-mover advantage is gone before most people even know the project exists.

The Gap Before the Tender

Every major development project in the UK goes through a planning approval process before it can break ground. A company submits a planning application to their local council. The council reviews it, consults on it publicly, and eventually either approves or refuses it. This process is entirely transparent and public, but it happens well before any procurement activity begins.

That gap, between planning approval and open tender, is where LeadLinka operates. A project that has just received planning permission represents a confirmed, approved opportunity. The client has committed to the project in principle. Land has been secured. The concept has cleared regulatory review. But no bids have been invited yet. No contractors have been approached. No consultants are engaged.

For a business development professional, this is the ideal moment to make contact.

Why This Hasn't Been Solved Before

The data exists. It is freely available. But accessing it comprehensively has required visiting hundreds of separate council planning portals, each with its own interface and data structure. There are over 400 local planning authorities in the UK. Monitoring all of them manually is not feasible. The result is that most companies either rely on industry contacts, or they wait until projects reach bidding platforms, at which point the competitive advantage is already lost.

How LeadLinka Works

Data Collection

LeadLinka pulls planning application data from local authority portals across the UK. This includes application references, project descriptions, site addresses, applicant details, application type, decision status, and submission and decision dates. The platform currently covers planning data and is being expanded to include additional public datasets over time.

Normalisation and Processing

Raw council data is inconsistent. Different authorities use different terminology, different field names, and different classification systems. LeadLinka normalises this data into a consistent schema, making it possible to search and filter across all authorities at once using the same criteria.

Algorithmic Lead Scoring

Not all planning approvals represent the same quality of opportunity. LeadLinka's scoring system evaluates applications across multiple dimensions including project scale, development type, location, applicant profile, and application history to rank opportunities by likely commercial value. This means users are surfaced the most relevant leads first, not just the most recent ones.

Search and Filtering

Users can filter opportunities by region, council, project type, date range, development category, and keyword. The platform is designed to support both broad market monitoring and highly targeted searches for specific types of work.

Who Benefits From LeadLinka

Market Context

The UK procurement market spans hundreds of billions of pounds of public and private sector activity annually, fed in large part by development projects that originate in the planning system. Tens of thousands of planning applications are decided each year across the 400-plus local authorities that make up the UK planning system. The volume of activity is enormous, but the tooling available to track and act on it at the pre-procurement stage has been almost entirely absent.

The market for procurement intelligence is growing as organisations professionalise their business development functions and demand earlier, more accurate signals about where spend is going. LeadLinka addresses the specific gap between freely available public data and the actionable intelligence that procurement-driven teams need to compete effectively.

Data and Compliance

All data surfaced by LeadLinka is derived from publicly available planning records published by UK local authorities under statutory obligations. LeadLinka does not collect or store personal data from planning applicants beyond what is published in public planning registers.

The platform operates in compliance with UK data protection law. Users of LeadLinka are responsible for using the information accessed through the platform in accordance with applicable law, including GDPR and any relevant sector-specific regulations. For full details, see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Frequently Asked Questions