Public Notices

The Challenge

Statutory public notices — planning applications, licensing decisions, road closures, and similar — have historically been published in the classified sections of local newspapers. While this meets the legal requirement, it has never been an especially accessible way for the public to find information that directly affects them. Notices are easy to miss, difficult to search, and impossible to browse by topic or location once the paper has been recycled.

The client needed a digital platform that could:

1. Accept notice submissions from multiple local authorities and media organisations
2. Publish notices in a structured, searchable format
3. Maintain a fully indexed historical archive
4. Present information clearly to members of the public who may not know the precise terminology used in statutory notices

The platform also had to be straightforward enough that editorial teams with limited technical skills could manage submissions and publication without developer involvement.

How We Approached It

We built the platform on ASP.NET with C#, using SQL Server for the structured notice data and Elastic Search for the public-facing search interface. The combination allowed us to offer both precise structured queries (by authority, category, date range) and free-text search across the full body of each notice.

Submission and Editorial Workflow

We developed a submission portal where local authorities and newspaper editorial teams could upload notices in bulk or individually. Each submission passed through a lightweight editorial review stage before going live, with automated validation catching common formatting issues and missing fields before a human editor ever saw the content.

Search and Discovery

The public search interface was designed with real people in mind, not just solicitors and planning consultants. We implemented:

• Location-based filtering so residents could find notices affecting their area
• Category browsing organised by notice type, from planning applications to public footpath orders
• Email alerts allowing users to subscribe to notifications for specific areas or categories
• Plain-language summaries alongside the full statutory text, making notices more approachable

Archive

Every notice published on the platform was permanently indexed and searchable, building a growing archive that proved valuable not only to the public but to legal professionals, journalists, and researchers.

The Outcome

The platform brought statutory public notices into the digital age in a practical, no-nonsense way. Public engagement with notices increased markedly once people could search by postcode or subscribe to alerts rather than scanning columns of small print. The multi-authority integration meant that the archive grew steadily, and the editorial teams found the submission workflow easy to adopt. What had been a static, print-first process became a genuinely useful public information resource.