💡 Officer Intelligence works best inside your planning journey — open or create your case there and your documents and site data fill this in for you.

🕵️ Case Officer Intelligence

Go beyond authority-level data. Understand individual case officer behaviour — approval rates, decision speed, refusal patterns, and what they focus on. Intelligence your competitors don't have.

🔒 PlanningCore Exclusive — Deep Officer Behaviour Analytics

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⚠️ Data limitations on this profile. Only 6 decisions on record for this officer at Durham — not enough to draw firm conclusions. Take any stats below as indicative only. Of 6 decisions, 1 (17%) have outcomes that couldn't be cleanly classified as approved or refused (e.g. "decided", "advice given", non-material amendments). The approval rate below is calculated from only the 5 clearly approved/refused decisions.

Known data gaps: our Idox scrape covers Gateshead, Sunderland, and Northumberland from late 2023 onwards. Newcastle Upon Tyne data is NOT in our corpus (the council's planning portal blocks IONOS shared-hosting IPs). If you're looking for a Newcastle case officer, their decisions won't appear here even if the officer name matches.

🕵️ Hilary Sperring · Durham

Total Decisions

40%

Approval Rate

48 days

Avg. Decision Time

Refusals

Jul 2026

Earliest Decision

Oct 2026

Latest Decision

📊 Application Type Breakdown

Application Type	Total	Approved	Refused	Other	Approval Rate
Unknown	6	2	3	1	40%

⏱️ Decision Speed Distribution

Under 4 weeks

4–8 weeks

8–13 weeks

13–26 weeks

Over 26 weeks

🚫 Refusal Details (3 refusals)

Reference	Address	Type	Decision Date	Similar precedents
DM/26/01824/FPA	Land To The East Of 16 Newgate Street Bishop Auckland DL14 7EG	—	15 Sep 2026	Find similar →
DM/26/01825/AD	Land To The East Of 16 Newgate Street Bishop Auckland DL14 7EG	—	15 Sep 2026	Find similar →
DM/26/01213/CEU	19 Frederick Street South Meadowfield Durham DH7 8LZ	—	08 Jul 2026	Find similar →

📋 Decision History (6 most recent)

Reference	Address	Type	Decision	Date	Days
DM/26/02644/PND	Low Houses West And East Low Houses Newbiggin DL12 0UJ	—	Approved	27 Oct 2026	25
DM/26/01824/FPA	Land To The East Of 16 Newgate Street Bishop Auckland DL14 7EG	—	Refused	15 Sep 2026	62
DM/26/01825/AD	Land To The East Of 16 Newgate Street Bishop Auckland DL14 7EG	—	Refused	15 Sep 2026	62
DM/26/02156/DRC	Westwood Farm Bowbank Barnard Castle DL12 0NT	—	Approved	14 Sep 2026	28
DM/26/01615/CPO	Spital Park Farm Stainmore Road Bowes Barnard Castle DL12 9RH	—	Withdrawn	17 Aug 2026	55
DM/26/01213/CEU	19 Frederick Street South Meadowfield Durham DH7 8LZ	—	Refused	08 Jul 2026	56

🧠 Strategy Insight

This officer has a below-average approval rate (40%). They apply strict scrutiny. Consider pre-application engagement and ensure every potential objection is addressed in your planning statement. Review their refusal history above for patterns.

What Makes This Different

📊 Officer Approval Rates

See each officer's personal approval rate, not just the authority average. Know whether your officer approves 95% or 65% of applications.

PlanningCore Exclusive

⏱️ Decision Speed Profile

Average days to decision per officer. Know if your officer is fast (under 8 weeks) or chronically slow — and plan your timeline accordingly.

Officer-level granularity

🚫 Refusal Pattern Analysis

What does this officer refuse on most? Design? Highways? Amenity? Heritage? Know their focus areas and address them proactively.

Deep refusal analytics

⚖️ Appeal Overturn Rate

How often are this officer's refusals overturned on appeal? A high overturn rate suggests the officer is too strict — useful for your appeal strategy.

Appeal data linked to officers

🏛️ Committee vs Delegated Split

Does this officer usually decide under delegated powers, or do their cases end up at committee? Different preparation needed for each route.

Committee/delegated tracking

🧠 Strategic Advice

Based on the officer's patterns, get tailored advice: what to emphasise in your planning statement, what issues to pre-empt, and how to frame your scheme.

AI-powered strategy layer

📡 Data Pipeline

Officer intelligence is generated from planning application decision data. As more authorities are ingested into PlanningCore, officer profiles become richer and more accurate.

📊 Data sources & freshness

planning_applications.case_officer (updated Daily ingest)
Live ingest from LPA portals (Idox + Civica + Northgate). Coverage varies by council — leading LPAs publish on every record, others publish only on committee reports.
Approval rate calculation
approvals / (approvals + refusals) per officer. Withdrawn and pending applications are excluded.
Date window
Stats reflect the entire decision history for the officer, not a rolling window. Recent volume changes can shift the averages.

About this tool: Case Officer Intelligence

Individual case officer profiling — approval rates, decision speed, refusal patterns, appeal overturn rates, and tailored submission strategy advice.

When to use it

Use when you know which officer is assigned to your case, or to research officer behaviour in an authority before submitting. Deep officer behaviour analytics exclusive to PlanningCore.

Policy and guidance it draws on

Data-driven analysis of individual officer decision patterns

Part of Authority Intelligence

Use these tools to understand how your Local Planning Authority behaves — what they approve, what they refuse, how often appeals succeed, and what strategy gives you the best chance. This is behavioural intelligence, not just policy research.

Guidance to help you prepare — not formal planning advice. Check the current policy text and your council's local plan before relying on it.