BLOGS

England's planning revolution: ambition meets reality

The Labour government's Planning and Infrastructure Bill, combined with the updated National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) introduced at the end of 2024, represents the most concerted attempt to rewire England's housing delivery machine in decades. Mandatory local housing targets are back, a new "grey belt" land category opens up lower-quality Green Belt land to development, and brownfield sites have been elevated to near-automatic approval in many local authority areas.

The policy intention is clear: build 1.5 million homes over this Parliament, with urban and previously developed land doing the heavy lifting. The question is whether the pipeline data bears that ambition out — or whether familiar bottlenecks are already appearing.

REalyse planning data shows that across England, over 677,000 residential units are currently sitting in applications that are still awaiting a decision, while a further 622,500 units hold a granted consent but have not yet broken ground. That is well over a million homes in the system — but not yet being built.

Grant rates are recovering, but the pipeline has shrunk

One of the clearest signals in the data is that planning application volumes have fallen significantly over the last five years, even as unit sizes per application have grown.

In 2021, English planning authorities decided on more than 28,500 residential applications — granting consent on around 425,000 units. By 2025, decided application volumes had fallen to roughly 18,900, yet the units attached to those grants — approximately 332,000 — held up better than the raw count suggests, pointing to a shift towards larger, more consolidated schemes.

Grant rates by application count tell an encouraging story for reformers. After dipping to around 68% in 2023 and 2024 — a period when local plan uncertainty and the interim NPPF left many authorities in a holding pattern — the grant rate recovered to approximately 72% in 2025, back in line with 2020–2021 levels. REalyse data shows that refused applications fell from nearly 10,900 in 2020 to around 7,200 in 2025, suggesting the reformed policy environment is filtering out weaker applications at the pre-submission stage and improving the quality of what reaches committee.

The partial-year 2026 figures (to July) are on course with recent trends, with over 130,000 units already granted consent in the first half of the year alone.

Where the pipeline is concentrating

The brownfield-first policy is producing a geographically distinctive pipeline. Among the local authorities with the highest volumes of newly granted residential units since 2024, urban London boroughs sit alongside regional growth hubs and expanding shire authorities.

REalyse data shows Ealing leading named English authorities with nearly 13,700 units granted since 2024 across 360 applications — an average scheme size of roughly 38 units, consistent with the mid-density flatted and mixed-use regeneration schemes the brownfield push is designed to unlock. Tower Hamlets (8,526 units from 136 applications) and Wandsworth (4,769 units) similarly reflect dense urban regeneration activity in the capital.

Outside London, Central Bedfordshire (11,473 units), South Oxfordshire (9,445 units) and Huntingdonshire (8,064 units) illustrate how growth pressure along key commuter and Oxford-Cambridge corridor geographies continues to direct large-format greenfield and urban extension schemes. Birmingham (8,176 units, 362 applications) represents the major regional city story: high volume, varied tenure, significant affordable housing obligations.

The mix matters for investors and developers alike. REalyse data shows that private house-building remains the dominant pipeline category — with new-build private houses accounting for over 768,000 units in applications over the last three years — but private flatted development (new build and refurbishment combined) adds a further 280,000-plus units, much of it in urban cores where brownfield land and upward density are central to the policy case.

Refurbishment and conversion: the quiet brownfield story

Alongside new build, refurbishment activity plays a growing role in the pipeline. REalyse data shows over 54,200 units of private flats in refurbishment applications over the last three years — more than 11,500 individual schemes. When refurbishment/extension combinations are included, the number rises further, suggesting that existing urban stock is being actively brought back into productive use.

This is partly driven by the government's reinforced permitted development rights for commercial-to-residential conversions, and partly by economic logic: on brownfield sites, conversion and intensification can be faster and cheaper than ground-up development when land acquisition and remediation costs are factored in.

For buy-to-let and build-to-rent investors, refurbished urban stock in established rental markets carries the additional advantage of income from day one — important when interest rate environments remain elevated. REalyse comparables and yield data show that gross rental yields on converted flatted stock in locations such as inner Birmingham, Leeds city centre and east London corridors can exceed those on equivalent new-build at comparable price points, particularly where refurbishment has modernised EPC ratings.

The delivery gap: consents are not completions

The most significant structural challenge in the data is the gap between consents granted and homes actually completed or started on site.

Across England, REalyse data shows approximately 168,975 units currently classified as in construction on granted schemes, and only around 63,600 units completed from the cohort of applications tracked since 2024. Set against the 622,500 units sitting on live granted consents, the build-out rate implied is well below what the government's 1.5-million-home target requires.

This is not a new problem. Housebuilders operate absorption-rate logic — controlling how quickly homes come to market to protect values — and land banking by some larger developers has long been a political flashpoint. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill attempts to address this with a "use it or lose it" principle and enhanced compulsory purchase powers for stalled sites, but the mechanisms are still working through legislation.

For investors and lenders underwriting development finance, the lesson is that a planning consent — even on a brownfield site with policy tailwinds — is not equivalent to a deliverable unit. REalyse pipeline data, which tracks scheme status from application through to construction and completion, allows investors to distinguish between live-build and stalled-consent exposure in any given geography, a distinction that is becoming increasingly important as competition for viable development finance tightens.

Outlook: the brownfield decade is beginning, but slowly

The policy direction is set. The reformed NPPF, mandatory targets, grey belt designation and streamlined approval routes for brownfield land collectively represent a structural shift in how England plans for housing. The data shows the early signs: recovering grant rates, growing average scheme sizes, urban boroughs leading the pipeline, and rising refurbishment activity in established rental markets.

But structural reform does not translate instantly into structural delivery. The pipeline contains over a million consented or pending units. Moving more of those into construction — and doing it on brownfield land that requires remediation, infrastructure investment and patient capital — is the decade's real challenge.

For developers, investors and lenders navigating this environment, granular pipeline intelligence matters more than ever. Knowing which local authorities are moving quickly, where consents are stalling pre-construction, and how refurbishment schemes compare to new build on a yield and risk-adjusted basis will separate those who capture the brownfield opportunity from those who simply observe it.