How Leeds Ended Up With Thousands of Duplicate Images Cluttering Its Planning Archive — and What Comes Next

Leeds City Council's planning portal contains tens of thousands of duplicate image files — the same site photographs, elevation drawings and heritage photographs uploaded multiple times across separate application records — a problem that has accumulated since the authority migrated to its current document management system in 2018. Officers within the Development Management directorate confirmed the issue is now the subject of an internal audit, with a remediation programme expected to begin in the autumn of 2026.

The timing matters. Leeds is in the middle of one of the heaviest planning periods in its modern history, with major schemes live across Kirkgate Market's eastern quarter, the South Bank regeneration corridor stretching from Meadow Lane to the Aire, and the former Yorkshire Evening Post site on Wellington Street. When case officers, ward councillors or members of the public search the portal for a specific site photograph or heritage assessment, duplicated records push relevant documents further down search returns, slowing decisions and — in at least some cases — causing applicants to resubmit documents that were already on file.

How the Backlog Built Up

The root cause stretches back to late 2017 and early 2018, when Leeds moved planning administration onto a new back-end system. At the time, staff were uploading supporting documents manually, and no automated deduplication tool was in place. A single major application — the kind covering a new apartment block in, say, the Quarry Hill or Little London neighbourhoods — could generate 80 to 120 separate image files. If an applicant resubmitted after an initial refusal, the entire document pack was re-uploaded rather than cross-referenced against what already existed.

By 2022 the council's own IT team had flagged the storage load as a concern, according to minutes from the council's Corporate Resources scrutiny panel published on the Leeds Democracy website in October of that year. The panel noted that planning documents were among the fastest-growing categories of data held on council servers. No dedicated budget was allocated at that stage to address the duplication problem specifically.

Civic tech volunteers associated with Open Data Leeds, a group that works with the council's data publishing team at Carriageworks on Millennium Square, first quantified the scale of the issue in a report circulated in March 2025. Their analysis of a sample of 500 planning applications found that 34 per cent of image files attached to those records were exact or near-exact duplicates of files already present elsewhere in the system. Extrapolated across the full archive — which by early 2025 held records for more than 60,000 applications dating to 1996 — the figure implied well over 100,000 redundant files.

What the Council Is Now Doing

The internal audit launched in May 2026 is being run jointly by the Development Management and Digital Services teams. It covers applications submitted between January 2018 and December 2024 — the period when manual uploading was the default practice. Officers are categorising duplicates into three tiers: exact copies, near-identical images with minor metadata differences, and documents where a later version supersedes an earlier one but both remain publicly visible on the portal.

A deduplication tool procured from a Manchester-based software supplier is being piloted on the Hunslet and Riverside ward archive — a practical choice because that ward includes a high density of South Bank applications and therefore a disproportionate share of the duplication problem. If the pilot runs on schedule through July and August, a council report going to the Plans Panel in September 2026 is expected to set out a phased rollout across the remaining 33 wards.

For residents and planning agents using the portal in the meantime, the Development Management team advises using the application reference number rather than keyword or image searches when looking for specific documents. The Leeds Planning Portal help page was updated in June 2026 with new guidance on filtering results by document type, which reduces the chance of duplicate images appearing in the first set of results. Anyone who believes a document is missing from a current live application can email the duty planning officer line directly, a process that typically generates a response within five working days.