London Councils Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Planning Portal This Week

The Greater London Authority's Planning Portal recorded a surge of complaints this week after a technical fault began generating duplicate images across hundreds of submitted planning applications, leaving architects, small developers and community groups unable to accurately review proposals. The problem, which appears to have worsened since Monday 29 June, has affected applications lodged through the joint national portal operated in partnership with the Planning Portal Ltd — the government-backed company that processes digital submissions for councils across England and Wales.

The timing is awkward for City Hall. The Labour government has placed planning reform at the heart of its domestic agenda, with Housing Secretary Angela Rayner pressing local authorities to accelerate approvals to hit a national housebuilding target. Any friction in the digital submission pipeline — however technical — lands badly when ministers are already scrutinising London's approval rates and Sadiq Khan's office is under pressure to demonstrate progress on the capital's housing numbers.

Where the Problem Is Showing Up

Complaints have been most concentrated in boroughs with high application volumes. Tower Hamlets Council, which processed more than 4,200 planning applications in the 2024-25 financial year according to its own published performance data, confirmed this week that staff had flagged the duplicate image issue to the national portal provider. Southwark Council's planning department, based at 160 Tooley Street, SE1, issued a notice to applicants advising them to check their uploaded document sets manually before expecting validation. The Royal Borough of Greenwich, handling a heavy load of applications tied to the ongoing Charlton Riverside regeneration scheme, posted a similar advisory on its website on Tuesday 1 July.

The fault means that when an applicant uploads a set of site photographs or architectural drawings, the portal is in some cases duplicating the same image file two or three times within the application record, while simultaneously omitting other required images. Validation officers — who must confirm an application is complete before the statutory 28-day determination clock starts — are therefore pausing submissions rather than accepting them as valid, creating a backlog.

For sole-trader architects and small practices operating out of studios in areas like Bermondsey and Dalston, where studio rents already run to roughly £30 to £45 per square foot annually, any delay to the validation stage translates directly into cash flow pressure. A delayed validation means a delayed determination, which can push a project's start date back by weeks and affect contractor scheduling.

What the Portal Provider Says — and What Comes Next

Planning Portal Ltd, which operates the national system under a contract with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, published a service status notice on its website on Wednesday 2 July acknowledging an image-processing anomaly affecting a subset of new submissions. The company said its technical team had identified the source of the fault and that a fix was being deployed in stages. It did not specify a completion date in the public notice.

The Local Government Association, which represents councils including those in London, has been in contact with the portal provider on behalf of member authorities, though it has not yet issued a formal statement on the scale of the disruption.

For applicants who submitted documents between 29 June and the date the fix is fully deployed, the practical advice from several borough planning teams is consistent: log back into the portal, navigate to your submitted application, and manually audit the documents section to confirm all required image files appear correctly and without duplication. If the record shows errors, contact the relevant borough validation team directly — not the national portal helpline — since borough officers have the authority to extend validation deadlines in cases where the fault is demonstrably technical.

Applicants in the pre-application stage are being advised by Southwark and Tower Hamlets to hold off submitting new applications with large image sets until the portal's status page confirms the fix is live. The Planning Portal Ltd's status page, at status.planningportal.co.uk, is being updated daily. Borough planning teams have stressed they are not penalising applicants for delays caused by the system fault — a small but material assurance for anyone watching a construction programme tick forward on a tight schedule.