'My Family's History, Gone': Londoners Speak Out After Councils Delete Duplicate Planning Images

Householders across London are discovering that photographs submitted alongside planning applications — images that sometimes include the only surviving record of a property's original facade, a demolished outbuilding, or a family's renovation history — have been silently removed from council online portals as part of automated duplicate-image replacement programmes. The deletions, which local democracy campaigners say have accelerated since at least January 2026, are surfacing at a moment when access to planning documents carries real financial and legal weight.

The issue sits at an uncomfortable intersection of data housekeeping and democratic accountability. Under the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, local planning authorities are required to maintain publicly accessible registers of planning decisions. Images attached to those applications are not always separately archived before automated systems overwrite them. With the Starmer government pushing councils to digitalise planning records faster under its Planning and Infrastructure Bill programme, the pace of system migrations is increasing — and so, campaigners argue, is the risk of accidental loss.

What Residents in Hackney and Hammersmith Found

Community groups in two London boroughs have been especially vocal. In Hackney, members of the Stoke Newington Conservation Area Advisory Committee say they have been tracking the problem since March 2026, when residents on Church Street found that before-and-after photographs submitted with a 2019 window-replacement application had been replaced by a generic placeholder image. The images had been the clearest evidence available in a subsequent neighbour dispute over the property's listed status.

In Hammersmith and Fulham, the Fulham Society — a local amenity group founded in 1969 and based in the SW6 area — has logged at least a dozen separate cases where images linked to applications on the council's Uniform planning portal appear to have been overwritten. One case involves a terrace on Lillie Road where the submitted photographs documented an Edwardian bay window subsequently altered without consent; those images were central to an enforcement query raised with the council in early 2025.

Residents affected describe the experience as disorienting. One woman whose family owns a Victorian conversion flat near London Fields said she had uploaded detailed photographs of original cornicing and sash windows as part of a 2021 permitted-development query, only to find the portal now shows broken image links. Another resident, who lives near the King Street stretch of Hammersmith town centre, said the photographs he submitted to contest a neighbouring property's retrospective application had disappeared entirely from the public record within months of the application being determined.

Data Loss With Real Consequences

The practical stakes are higher than they might first appear. Property solicitors routinely advise buyers to check planning portals as part of conveyancing due diligence. Historic England estimates that around 400,000 planning applications touch listed or locally listed buildings each year across England; London accounts for a disproportionate share of those cases given the density of conservation areas — the city has more than 1,000 designated conservation areas, according to Historic England's 2023 data.

The Local Government Association has previously flagged the fragility of document retention in planning systems as councils shift between software providers, though the specifics of the current duplicate-replacement issue have not been the subject of a formal LGA report as of this writing. Several London boroughs, including Tower Hamlets and Southwark, migrated to new planning software platforms in late 2024 and early 2025, a period that coincides with many of the deletion reports now emerging.

The Mayor of London's office publishes planning data through the London Datastore, but image files associated with borough-level applications are not routinely mirrored there, meaning the borough portals remain the sole authoritative public source.

Residents and community groups who believe planning images have been lost should act quickly. Submit a Subject Access Request or a general information request to the relevant borough council's planning department, specifying the application reference number and the date images were last visible. The campaign group PlanningResource has published a template letter on its website. Solicitors handling conveyancing on affected properties should note that the absence of images from a portal does not necessarily mean the council holds no copy — internal document management systems sometimes retain files that are no longer publicly visible — so a formal request in writing is the fastest route to confirmation.