BLOGS

A pipeline that looks busy but delivers less

On paper, England's planning system looks like it's back in motion. REalyse data tracking residential (C3 use class) applications shows submissions climbing to roughly 1,285 in 2024 and holding above 1,200 in 2025 — a marked rebound from the trough of 861 applications in 2023, and close to the highest annual volume in our five-year window.

For anyone reading the headline number alone, this looks like renewed confidence: more schemes coming forward, more sites being tested, more optionality for housebuilders and land promoters. But the more useful story sits underneath the topline count, in what happens to those applications once they enter the system — and in how many actual homes they represent.

That's where the picture turns. This is a pipeline-versus-delivery story, not a housebuilding boom.

Approval rates are drifting down, not up

REalyse data shows the granted share of decided residential applications has been on a gentle but consistent slide: from around 74% in 2021 to roughly 63% in 2025. Refusal rates have moved in the opposite direction, rising from about 15% to close to 19% over the same period, alongside a growing share of applications still sitting undecided.

The volume of granted applications hasn't kept pace with submissions either. In 2024, applications hit a multi-year high of 1,285, but only 881 secured consent — a lower absolute number of approvals than the 951 total applications submitted in the weaker year of 2022. More applications are entering the funnel, but a shrinking proportion, and in some years a shrinking absolute number, are coming out the other side as consented schemes.

For institutional investors and lenders underwriting on the assumption that "more applications" signals "more supply," this is worth pausing on. A busier planning register does not automatically translate into a stronger delivery pipeline.

The units gap is the real signal

The starkest divergence is in unit volumes, not application counts. Total residential units proposed across submitted applications peaked at nearly 30,000 in 2022, but by 2024 and 2025 that figure had fallen to roughly 10,000–12,000 — even as application counts recovered to near-record levels.

Granted units show the same pattern in sharper relief: from around 28,000 units granted consent in 2022 to under 8,000 in 2025. In other words, more schemes are being submitted, but they are smaller — more infill, extensions and small-site applications, and fewer large strategic allocations moving through committee. That shift in scheme composition, rather than sentiment alone, appears to be a meaningful driver of the headline application count.

For developers screening sites, this reinforces the case for scrutinising scheme size and local authority track record alongside raw application volume. A district showing a "surge" in planning activity may simply be processing a higher count of smaller applications, not unlocking a larger pipeline of deliverable homes.

What this means for developers, lenders and investors

The widening gap between applications and approved units has practical implications across the value chain:

• Development managers sourcing sites should weight local authority approval-rate trends and average consented scheme size alongside application counts when assessing delivery risk in a target local authority.

• Credit and risk analysts at lenders assessing development finance exposure may want to treat rising application volumes as a weaker proxy for future completions than it has been historically, and instead track granted units and committee decision timelines directly.

• Investors benchmarking regional supply pipelines against REalyse comparables and demographic data can use granted-unit trends, rather than submission trends, to more accurately forecast future competition for stock and pressure on achieved sale prices and rents in a given postcode district.

With refusal rates edging up and a growing share of applications sitting undecided for longer, average determination timelines are also worth monitoring — slower committee throughput compounds the delivery gap even where consent is eventually granted.

Outlook

England's planning system is processing more applications than it has in several years, but the units actually being unlocked for delivery have not recovered at the same pace. Until approval rates stabilise and larger strategic sites re-enter the pipeline in greater numbers, the gap between planning activity and deliverable housing supply is likely to persist.

For professional investors and lenders, the practical takeaway is to look past application counts to granted units, approval rates and scheme size when assessing local authority delivery pipelines — the kind of granular, comparable-level view that REalyse's planning and development data is built to support.