I’ve been engaged in a number of urban planning issues recently. But I will only generally be notified of planning applications relating to my own section of my own street and the one behind it. So it’s difficult to keep track of all the planning applications that could be of concern.

If my local art deco cinema building is to become an evangelical church, or if acres of back gardens are to have 70-odd flats built on them, nobody from the council will tell me: I’ll only find out when it’s too late to do anything.

To make matters worse, the boundaries of five boroughs meet not far from here, but community facilities and people’s lives are no respecters of local administrative boundaries. To keep track of what’s going on in just a small radius of my home, local government expects me to monitor activity in five different planning departments.

That’s why Planning Alerts is so valuable. PA will notify me by email whenever a planning application is filed within my area(s) of interest. I just input a postcode and define a radius, and, as the saying goes, Bob’s your uncle. The user interface is excellent: it’s simple, but provides key information, such as showing me my defined radius on a map before I confirm my selection.

Planning Alerts is currently in Beta, covering around 300 local authorities, with new ones being added. It’s the kind of service that helps citizens participate in local democratic processes, and should be coming from government, but isn’t. Instead, it’s been built by Richard Pope, Mikel Maron, Sam Smith, Duncan Parkes, Tom Hughes and Andy Armstrong. The site is hosted by the fine people at mySociety.org.

How does Planning Alerts work? Unfortunately, the Royal Mail has a stranglehold on the postcodes database. Read more on Harry Metcalfe’s blog. So a new service has been established at ernestmarples.com; a sort of postcode liberation API, which anyone can use. Where’s the data coming from? Harry and Richard are not saying. Is it legal? Maybe not. Yet. But many people are hoping it will become so.