How Liverpool's Street-Level Image Problem Built Up Over Years, and What's Being Done About It

Liverpool City Council's digital planning and heritage records contain hundreds of duplicate and outdated property images, a problem that has accumulated across more than a decade of piecemeal digitisation projects and now threatens to complicate planning decisions across some of the city's most sensitive neighbourhoods. The issue, which affects the council's local list of heritage assets as well as its public-facing planning portal, has come to a head as the authority pushes forward with a wider digital infrastructure overhaul scheduled for completion by late 2026.

The stakes are higher than a simple housekeeping headache. When planning officers, architects or members of the public consult official image records for streets in areas such as Toxteth, Everton or the Georgian Quarter, they may be looking at photographs taken years or even decades apart, sometimes of the wrong building entirely, with file metadata that contradicts what they are seeing on screen. In a city where conservation area boundaries are contested and where funding bids often hinge on documented physical condition, that kind of confusion carries real consequences.

How the Backlog Developed

The roots of the problem go back to at least 2011, when the council began migrating its legacy paper-based planning records onto its Idox Uniform system. The migration was done in stages, with different teams handling residential streets, listed buildings and locally listed assets separately. Each team applied its own naming conventions. Images taken by council surveyors during the late 1990s regeneration programmes around Granby Street and the Kensington area were uploaded alongside more recent digital photographs, often with identical or near-identical file names but different content.

The issue compounded during the period between 2015 and 2020, when the council outsourced elements of its planning support work. Contractors working under separate service agreements uploaded imagery into the same shared directories without a centralised deduplication protocol in place. By the time the Historic England local listing review of 2021 drew attention to inconsistencies in the council's heritage image records, particularly around the terraced streets of Anfield and parts of Dingle, the duplication had embedded itself across multiple layers of the system.

Liverpool's Planning and Development Directorate has acknowledged the problem in internal review documents circulated earlier this year, though no formal public statement has been issued. The council's Corporate Digital Strategy, published in March 2025, set a target of reducing data duplication across all departmental systems by 40 percent before the end of the 2026-27 financial year. The planning image database is listed as a priority workstream within that programme.

What Happens Next

The practical work of replacing and rationalising the duplicate images is now under way, led by a small in-house team within the Planning Support Unit based at the Municipal Buildings on Dale Street. The process involves manually cross-referencing the Idox records against Ordnance Survey address data, then flagging duplicates for review before a verified replacement image, sourced either from council surveyors or from accredited third-party providers, is uploaded and the old files archived.

Community heritage groups have a role to play here too. The Toxteth-based organisation The Florence Institute Trust has already been in contact with the council about ensuring that imagery related to buildings in the L8 postcode accurately reflects current condition rather than pre-regeneration states. Merseyside Civic Society, which has long campaigned for better heritage documentation across the city, has pushed for a clearer public timeline on when the cleansed records will be accessible via the planning portal.

For anyone currently consulting the portal for research, planning applications or heritage assessments, the practical advice is to treat any image dated before 2020 with caution and to request a current surveyor's record from the Planning Support Unit directly, a process that typically takes five to ten working days. The council has indicated that a fully verified and deduplicated image set for Grade II listed buildings within the city's seven conservation areas should be in place by the end of this calendar year. For locally listed assets, the timeline extends into 2027.