Authority monitoring reports: what applicants can use

An authority monitoring report is the most useful free document a developer never reads. Every local planning authority in England has to produce one under section 35 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, with the content prescribed by the Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012. It tells you how many homes the authority has delivered, whether its plan is on programme, and which policies it has quietly stopped relying on. All of that is admissible in a planning statement, and it comes from the authority's own hand, which makes it hard to argue with.

Find it under monitoring, local plan evidence or planning policy on the council's website. It is rarely linked from the application pages.

What the monitoring report has to contain

The 2012 Regulations set the required content, and the list is shorter than most authorities' reports suggest. The report must cover progress on each local plan document against the timetable in the local development scheme, the number of net additional dwellings in the reporting period and since the plan was adopted, affordable housing completions where the plan contains an affordable housing policy, activity on neighbourhood development plans and orders, and what the authority has done to discharge its duty to co-operate.

Everything beyond that is discretionary, which is why the reports vary so much in length and quality. Some run to two hundred pages of indicators. Others are a twelve-page table.

The discretionary material is often the most useful part. Authorities that track policy-level indicators publish approval rates against individual development management policies, appeal performance by issue, and the reasons for refusal they use most often. If that material exists, read it before you decide how to frame an application.

Housing completions, commitments and the delivery test

Net additional dwellings is the headline figure and the one most often cited back at an authority. Read it alongside the commitments table, which lists extant permissions not yet built, because the two together tell you whether the authority has a delivery problem or a consenting problem.

A council that has granted permission for far more homes than it has delivered will argue that supply is adequate and the market is at fault. A council whose commitments are thin has a weaker answer. Either way the relevant national test is the Housing Delivery Test, published annually by the department, which measures delivery against the requirement over a rolling three-year period.

The monitoring report usually reproduces the authority's own delivery figures, and those figures feed the test. Where the report's completions data and the published test result do not reconcile, that discrepancy is worth putting in front of the case officer, because it affects how the authority can present its supply position. The wider consequences of a weak supply position are set out in the discussion of housing land supply and what it changes for applicants.

Progress against the local development scheme

The local development scheme is the authority's published timetable for preparing plan documents, required by section 15 of the 2004 Act. The monitoring report has to say whether each document is on programme.

This section is where authorities are most candid, because the Regulations require them to explain slippage. A report that records a local plan examination delayed by three years, a site allocations document abandoned, or a supplementary planning document consulted on in 2019 and never adopted is telling you something about the weight each document carries.

Two uses follow. First, an emerging plan that has slipped badly carries less weight as a material consideration, and the monitoring report is the cleanest evidence of the slippage. Second, a plan adopted long ago and not reviewed is vulnerable, because authorities are expected to review plans at least every five years and to update them where needed.

Where a neighbourhood plan is in the picture the same logic applies at a smaller scale, and the practical steps for checking whether a neighbourhood plan covers your site start from the monitoring report's list.

Infrastructure delivery and what moved to the funding statement

Developer contributions used to be reported in the monitoring report. They are not any more. Since the 2019 amendments to the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010, authorities that charge the levy or collect planning obligations must publish an infrastructure funding statement each year by 31 December, covering the preceding financial year.

That statement is the better document for contributions. It reports levy and obligation income, what was spent, what remains unallocated and what the authority intends to fund. The monitoring report may still carry an infrastructure delivery narrative, and the two documents should be read together because they sometimes disagree.

For a developer negotiating heads of terms, unallocated balances are the useful number. An authority sitting on a large unspent balance for a type of infrastructure has a weaker case for asking you to fund more of it, and the detail behind that argument is covered in the look at infrastructure funding statements and where the money went.

Using the figures in a planning statement

Cite the report properly or do not cite it at all. Give the authority's name, the title of the document, the monitoring year it covers, the page or table number, and the figure. Officers check, and a misattributed figure undermines the rest of the statement.

Then use it for something specific. Three uses carry weight.

1. Establishing the supply position, by setting completions against the requirement in the adopted plan over the plan period to date.
2. Establishing that a policy is not being applied as written, by pointing to the authority's own indicator data on approvals against that policy.
3. Establishing that an emerging plan or supplementary document carries little weight, by quoting the authority's own record of its progress.

What does not work is quoting a figure without an argument attached to it. A planning statement that recites five years of completions data and then moves on has added pages without adding weight, and officers skim it.

Spotting a plan that is out of date

Section 38(6) of the 2004 Act requires determination in accordance with the development plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise, so the age and currency of the plan matters a great deal.

The monitoring report gives you four indicators of currency. The adoption date of each document in the plan. Whether a review has been carried out and what it concluded. Whether the authority is meeting the delivery requirement. And whether the plan's own housing trajectory has been met or quietly replaced with a revised one.

A plan whose trajectory has been restated downwards without a plan review is the clearest signal that the policies most important for determining a housing application may be out of date. That is an argument to make with evidence rather than assertion, and the authority's own monitoring report is the evidence.

Where the numbers get contested

Four areas generate most of the disagreement, and knowing them lets you anticipate the authority's response.

Net additional dwellings includes conversions, changes of use and demolitions, so a gross completions figure quoted without the demolition deduction overstates delivery. Student and other communal accommodation is converted to a dwelling equivalent using a published ratio, and authorities with large purpose-built student schemes can show strong delivery while adding few family homes.

Commitments are usually counted as permissions regardless of how old they are, so a commitments table full of permissions approaching expiry overstates deliverable supply. And windfall allowances, where an authority assumes a continuing supply of small unidentified sites, depend on a demonstrated historic trend that the monitoring report should evidence and sometimes does not.

None of these is a reason to dismiss the document. They are reasons to read the methodology notes at the back, which is where authorities disclose the assumptions and where a careful reader finds the argument.

For the application documents themselves, the report types that carry this evidence are set out in the index of report types by category.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. You can enter a postcode on PlanScope to see which reports a site is likely to need.