Councils in England decided 91 per cent of major planning applications on time in the first quarter of 2026.
Only 19 per cent were decided within the statutory thirteen weeks.
Both numbers come from the same government release, and the gap between them is the most useful thing anyone in London property can know about how the system currently works.
What the “on time” figure actually measures
The phrase councils report against is “within thirteen weeks or the agreed time”. That second clause is an extension of time agreement, a written agreement between applicant and authority to set the statutory deadline aside.
Once signed, the application counts as on time no matter how long it takes.
In the quarter ending March 2026, MHCLG recorded that 43 per cent of all planning decisions in England involved a performance agreement of this kind. For major applications it was 77 per cent. For minor applications, 54 per cent.
Strip the agreements out and the picture changes completely. Majors: 19 per cent inside thirteen weeks against 91 per cent reported. Minors: 38 per cent inside eight weeks against 87 per cent reported.
Nobody is falsifying anything. The metric simply measures whether a deadline was met or renegotiated, and treats both outcomes identically. For a business planning a programme around it, that is close to useless.
Where the time goes: 2,660 missing planners
The cause is not mysterious. There are not enough planners.
The Home Builders Federation put the shortfall at 2,200 planning officers across England and Wales in January 2025, with 80 per cent of local planning authorities operating below full capacity. In research reported in September 2026, that shortfall had risen to 2,660, a 20 per cent increase, with 90 per cent of authorities now below full staffing.
The number went up after roughly £100m of government investment in planning capacity since 2024.
Departments are averaging around 80 per cent of the staff they need. Turnover runs at about 11 per cent, and more than half of councils rely on agency workers. Planning officers and senior planners make up almost half of all vacancies.
One figure from that research deserves particular attention from anyone building at small scale. In the 2025 survey, 51 per cent of SME builders reported waiting more than a year for planning permission.
Why councils cannot fill the posts
The RTPI’s State of the Profession 2025 report for England shows a recruitment problem concentrated precisely where experience matters.
Of the authorities surveyed, 96.9 per cent reported difficulty recruiting principal planning officers and team leaders. For senior planners it was 90.8 per cent, and for heads of planning 86.2 per cent.
Graduate roles were the easiest to fill. So the shortage is not of people entering the profession. It is of people with enough experience to determine an application without supervision.
Two thirds of authorities, 67.7 per cent, are using agency staff to cover. On pay, 21.5 per cent named uncompetitive wages as a barrier to recruitment.
The demographics make it worse. In local government planning, 57.5 per cent of the workforce is over 45, and only 39.1 per cent expect to still be in their current role in three years. Around 16 per cent expect to retire in that window.
Worth noting on the data: the RTPI’s authority sample was 65 of 337, so treat it as a strong survey rather than a census.
Spending down 16.6 per cent, income up 16.7 per cent
Here is the number that explains the other numbers.
Since 2010, total local authority planning spending in England has fallen 16.6 per cent in real terms. Development management spending is down 9.6 per cent. Planning policy spending is down 28.8 per cent.
Over the same period, planning income rose 16.7 per cent.
Income up, spending down. Planning fees are not ring-fenced, so money paid in by applicants goes into the general fund and gets allocated against everything else a council has to do. An applicant paying for a service is not necessarily funding the service they are paying for.
Who subsidises a planning application, and why that changes this year
Even with income rising, fees have never covered costs. Government estimated a £330m annual shortfall between planning fee income and the cost of running planning services in 2024/25.
The consultation wording was blunt about it: no planning fee fully covers the cost of determining an application, with shortfalls ranging from 18 per cent for the least underpriced to 60 per cent for the most underpriced.
This has been visible for years. Back in September 2023 the Local Government Association put the subsidy at almost £5m a week, with a deficit of £245.4m in 2020/21 across 305 planning departments, and argued fees needed to rise 57 per cent for full cost recovery.
The government response on planning fees, published 16 July 2026, moves on both fronts. All planning fees rise to an estimated 90 per cent cost recovery through regulations in summer 2026. Framework regulations for local fee setting follow before the end of 2026, allowing authorities to set fees up to 30 per cent above the national default where the evidence supports it.
For applicants the arithmetic is uncomfortable. You will pay materially more, and there is still no contractual commitment on speed in return. A faster service is the hoped-for outcome of better funding, not a term of the transaction.
Does the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 fix this?
Not yet, and not for anyone building at the scale most London businesses build at.
The Act received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025. Its planning provisions include a national scheme of delegation limiting which applications reach committee, mandatory training for committee members, statutory extensions where permissions face judicial review, and the power for authorities to set fees recovering full costs.
As things stand, the judicial review extension provisions came into force on 18 February 2026. Most of the rest awaits commencement regulations.
The judicial review measure helps large schemes facing legal challenge. It does nothing for a householder or a ten-unit developer. The delegation reform, which is the provision that would genuinely move determination times by keeping routine decisions with officers, is still waiting.
Is appealing faster than waiting?
Usually not, and the numbers are worth knowing before anyone treats an appeal as a shortcut.
The Planning Inspectorate had 9,796 open cases at the end of March 2026. Over the preceding twelve months it received 19,779 appeals and decided 19,617, so receipts slightly exceed decisions and the backlog is not shrinking.
Median time across all cases was 21 weeks, with a mean of 30. Written representations ran to a median of 20 weeks, hearings 24, inquiries 28. Householder appeals were faster at a median of 12.6 weeks. Enforcement appeals took a median of 65 weeks.
Section 78 appeals tell the second-order story. Receipts in the final quarter were up 18.2 per cent year on year, against an inspector resource of 435 full-time equivalents. When authorities cannot determine, the queue moves downstream rather than disappearing. Around 32 per cent of those appeals were allowed.
What does the delay actually cost?
This is the part nobody models, so here is the arithmetic, openly, for anyone who wants to check it or substitute their own figures.
Take a small London scheme on bridging finance. Bridging Trends put the average monthly interest rate at 0.81 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, on an average term of twelve months.
Sixteen weeks of additional delay is roughly 3.7 months. At 0.81 per cent a month that is about 3 per cent of the facility drawn. On a £250,000 facility, roughly £7,400 in interest, on a delay the borrower did not cause and formally agreed to.
For a householder renting elsewhere during works, the ONS put average monthly private rent in London at £2,332 in August 2026. The same sixteen weeks costs about £8,600.
Those are illustrations built from published averages, not survey findings. The point is not the precise figure. It is that an extension of time agreement has a price, it falls entirely on the applicant, and it appears in no statistic anywhere.
Which is why programme certainty is worth paying for on the delivery side, where it can actually be bought. Fixed-price contracting against a single agreed scope, of the kind Beams runs on London residential projects, will not make a borough determine faster. It does mean the one part of the timeline you control is not also drifting, and that the money you are burning on planning delay is not compounded by an open-ended build cost.
What is waiting on the other side
The delay defers a real return rather than destroying it, and it is worth sizing.
Nationwide’s What Adds Value report of October 2025 found that a 10 per cent increase in floor space adds about 5 per cent to the price of a typical house. Adding a double bedroom through a loft conversion or extension to a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house can add up to 24 per cent. Going from two bedrooms to three adds 13 per cent on a terrace and 14 per cent on a semi.
Average renovation spend in that research was about £52,000, rising to about £97,000 among households aged 25 to 34. Only 4 per cent of homeowners regretted the work.
Nationwide does not publish a London-specific uplift, so applying those percentages to London’s average house price of £569,000 in July 2026, per ONS, is an extrapolation rather than a finding. On that basis a 5 per cent uplift is around £28,000, and the deferral cost of a four-month planning delay starts to look like a meaningful fraction of the gain.
Enforcement is the warning sign
If you want a forward indicator of where capacity failure goes next, look at enforcement, because nobody pays a fee for it.
The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman reported in February 2026 that planning enforcement accounted for 47 per cent of all upheld planning and development complaints in 2025-26, up from 26 per cent in 2021-22.
Within that report, 80 per cent of enforcement officers said their team had insufficient staff, 89 per cent reported case backlogs and 73 per cent said their authority struggles to recruit.
The unfunded function degrades first. The funded one degrades more slowly and hides it behind an agreed extension.
What would change the numbers
Four things, none of which require new primary legislation.
Publish determination times gross of extensions of time, so the reported figure and the applicant’s experience are the same number. The data already exists in the published tables; it simply is not the headline.
Ring-fence planning fee income to planning departments, so that a 90 per cent cost recovery fee regime actually funds 90 per cent of the service rather than the general fund.
Commence the delegation provisions of the 2025 Act, which are sitting on the statute book doing nothing.
And publish resourcing data at authority level. There is currently no verified London-level dataset on planning department vacancies, which means the boroughs with the worst capacity problems cannot be identified from public information. That absence is itself part of the accountability problem.
Sources
MHCLG, Planning applications in England, January to March 2026, released 19 June 2026, for performance agreement shares and statutory determination rates.
RTPI, State of the Profession 2025: England, for vacancy rates, recruitment difficulty by grade, agency use, workforce age profile and the real-terms planning spend series.
Home Builders Federation research on planning department staffing, January 2025, and further research reported in September 2026, for the planner shortfall and SME builder wait times.
Local Government Association, September 2023, for the historic planning fee subsidy position.
Fees for planning applications: government response, published 16 July 2026, for the move to 90 per cent cost recovery and local fee setting powers.
Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, Royal Assent 18 December 2025, for the planning provisions and commencement position.
Planning Inspectorate statistical release, 23 April 2026, for appeal volumes, timescales, open caseload and inspector resource.
Bridging Trends, second quarter 2026, for average bridging interest rates and terms.
ONS, Private rent and house prices, UK, September 2026, for London average rent and house price.
Nationwide, What Adds Value special report, 15 October 2025, for floor space and bedroom value uplift figures and renovation spend.
Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, Losing control: complaints about planning enforcement, 17 February 2026, for enforcement complaint trends and officer survey data.
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