Reading planning statistics for determination times

The quarterly planning application statistics will tell you what proportion of an authority's decisions were made within the statutory period or an agreed extension. They will not tell you how long your application will take. Those are different questions, and the gap between them is almost entirely made up of extensions of time.

Use the data anyway. Read correctly it shows you whether an authority routinely asks for more time, how much major application work it handles, and whether it is getting slower. That is enough to build a programme around, provided you add the stages the dataset does not cover.

What the quarterly statistics cover

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government publishes a statistical release each quarter for England, with live tables giving figures for every local planning authority. Each release covers a quarter that has already closed, typically published a few months later, so the most recent data is always historic.

The useful fields are the number of decisions by category, the number and percentage decided within the relevant period, and the proportion granted. Download the live tables rather than reading the commentary, because the commentary is national and you want one row.

Pull four quarters rather than one. A single quarter for a small district can turn on a handful of applications, and a summer quarter reflects holiday cover as much as capacity.

Major, minor and other categories

The categories matter because the statutory period differs between them, and because comparing your scheme with the wrong category will mislead you.

Householder applications sit inside the other category in most tables, which is worth knowing if you are looking for extension performance. And the major threshold in the statistics mirrors the thresholds used elsewhere in the system, so a scheme at nine units is measured against an eight week expectation while a scheme at ten is measured against 13.

Performance measured against designation thresholds

Two measures drive the designation regime. Speed, expressed as the percentage of decisions made within the period or an agreed extension. Quality, expressed as the proportion of an authority's decisions overturned at appeal.

The criteria and the thresholds sit in a published designation document, and they have been revised more than once, with separate speed thresholds for major and non-major applications and a single quality threshold. Read the current version rather than a figure quoted in an older article, including this one.

Designation matters to an applicant for one practical reason. Where an authority is designated, certain applications can be submitted directly to the Planning Inspectorate rather than to the council. That is rarely the right commercial choice, because you lose local negotiation entirely, but it is a lever worth knowing about.

Extensions of time and how they affect the figures

This is the part that makes the headline percentages nearly meaningless as a speed measure.

A decision counts as in time if it is made within the statutory period, or within a longer period agreed in writing with the applicant, or within a planning performance agreement timetable. So an authority that agrees a 26 week extension on every major application and then decides within it records 100 per cent performance.

There is no published field separating the two. You cannot tell from the statistics how many decisions were in time because the authority was quick and how many were in time because the applicant signed an extension.

What you can do is triangulate. Look at an authority's decisions on a public register over the same period and compare validation dates with decision dates on a sample of applications similar to yours. Twenty applications gives you a better sense of real duration than any percentage, and searching decision data across authorities makes that sample quick to assemble.

Using the data to plan a programme

Build the programme from stages, then use the statistics as a sanity check on the determination stage only.

1. Pre-application: however long the authority's published service says, plus the time to prepare for it.
2. Preparation and submission: driven by survey seasons more than by anything else.
3. Validation: allow two to four weeks unless you have evidence otherwise, and expect longer where the validation list is detailed.
4. Determination: the statutory period as a floor, with a realistic extension allowance informed by your sample.
5. Committee, where applicable: find the published committee calendar and note the report deadline before each meeting.
6. Section 106 completion: frequently the longest single stage on a major scheme, and entirely absent from the statistics.
7. Decision notice issue.

As an illustrative example, a 60 unit scheme in an authority reporting 88 per cent of majors decided in time might reasonably be programmed at 13 weeks statutory, plus 12 weeks of agreed extension based on a sample of comparable decisions, plus three weeks validation, plus eight weeks for a section 106 that has to go to a second reading. That gives a working assumption of about nine months from submission to decision notice, which is a very different figure from the 88 per cent.

Getting the submission complete first time is the one stage you control, and knowing which of the report types a major application needs before you start is what keeps validation to weeks rather than months.

What the statistics will not tell you

Six things, all of which affect your programme.

Time from submission to validation. Time spent in pre-application. Whether a consultee routinely misses the 21 day period. Whether the authority has a functioning committee cycle or a backlog of deferred items. How long section 106 negotiation takes. And anything at all about the officer who will handle your case.

The dataset also says nothing about quality of engagement. An authority with mediocre speed figures and an officer who answers the phone is usually a better bet than a fast authority that never responds until the decision arrives.

Asking the authority the right question

Three questions, by email, to the planning administration team rather than to a case officer.

What is the current interval between submission and validation for this category of application? Does the authority expect to seek an extension of time for an application of this scale, and if so, of what length? What is the committee calendar and the report deadline for the likely determination window?

Those answers, plus a sample of comparable decisions from the public register, give you a programme you can defend to a funder. The published percentage does not. Where you are assembling that sample into something reusable, the licensing position is worth checking first, and reusing the data under the Open Government Licence sets out what is permitted.

And keep the sample. Repeat it annually for the authorities you work in, and you will know more about determination periods in those areas than any national dataset can tell you.

Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which reports your scheme is likely to need before the clock starts.

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.