New Feature
• Local Authority / Council Byelaws and Policies
Those of you who have been around for a while will remember that back in June 2021 we launched a new feature which allowed you to look up the byelaws that a local authority / council might have in place that could affect your ability to fly.
While local authorities are slow to move, they do from time to time change their policies or introduce / update byelaws.
Trying to find the byelaw for a given LA can be very time consuming, all their web sites are different, none of their search boxes work properly, they all have dead links, and so on.
So we’ve made it really easy for you to find if a local authority has a byelaw, and if so, the details of that byelaw, and / or any polices they may have.
To that end, Grey Arrows Drone Club submitted 379x Freedom of Information requests to local authorities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
We’ve got around 50% of the results back in, and the rest are due in within the next couple of weeks so now is a good time to release this updated capability.
To find out if a LA has a byelaw or policy, simply click on the “question mark” button on the map.
Clicking on this will clear all your current layers off the map (don’t worry, we put them back again later!).
You can then click anywhere on the map to see which local authority is responsible for that area. The boundary of the council will be displayed on the map in very high detail:
If you then click on the displayed boundary you’ll get a popup info box that will tell you which local authority is responsible for this area:
If you click on the “What do they know?” link in the info box as if by magic a new tab will open in your browser and you’ll be whisked over to the Freedom of Information (FOI) results for that authority.
You might notice some FOI requests with a status of “did not have the information requested” response, eg:
This is more often than not because they don’t actually have a byelaw or policy, so they can’t provide any details.
Therefore, please don’t read the red colour as meaning you can’t fly there, it is probably the exact opposite.