BLOGS

A widening gap between ambition and delivery

England's planning system is sending two contradictory signals at once. On one hand, the volume of homes proposed through planning applications has surged to its highest level in years, a sign that developers are betting on renewed demand and government pressure to build. On the other, the proportion of applications actually being granted has fallen to a multi-year low. For an industry that lives and dies by pipeline visibility, this divergence matters more than either trend on its own.

REalyse's planning dataset, tracking residential applications submitted across England since 2021, shows total proposed units climbing to roughly 226,000 in the most recent quarter, comfortably the highest quarterly total in the series and well above the 2021–2022 run rate of 135,000–160,000 units per quarter. Yet the approval rate over the same period has dropped to around 68%, down from a series high of nearly 77% in mid-2021. Put simply: more homes are being proposed, but a smaller share of them are clearing the system.

Applications are getting bigger, not more numerous

The headline "surge" is not a story of more applications landing on planning officers' desks. In fact, the raw count of residential applications submitted each quarter has fallen fairly steadily since 2021, from roughly 8,000–8,400 per quarter to closer to 4,800–5,200 more recently. What has changed is the scale of individual schemes.

Average units proposed per application have risen sharply, particularly in the second half of 2025, pointing to a market where fewer, larger sites are doing more of the work. This is consistent with what REalyse's land and planning comparables have been showing across major regional cities: strategic land promoters and volume housebuilders are consolidating pipeline into bigger consented schemes, while smaller and medium-sized developers submit fewer applications, likely deterred by cost, delay and the uncertainty of outcome.

For investors and lenders, this concentration effect raises a practical question: is future housing delivery becoming more dependent on a smaller number of large, complex schemes, each carrying its own risk of delay, phasing and viability renegotiation?

Approval rates: the real bottleneck

The approval rate trend is the sharper story. Granted applications as a share of decided cases have declined from the mid-70s percentage range in 2021 to below 70% through most of 2023–2025, dipping into the high-60s in the most recent quarters, the weakest points in the series. Refusal rates have crept up in parallel, though the bigger shift is the growing share of applications sitting in progress or being withdrawn, up noticeably in late 2025 compared with the 2021–2022 baseline.

That combination, more undecided cases and a lower share of outright approvals, points to local planning authorities under sustained resourcing pressure, more schemes triggering committee-level scrutiny, and applicants increasingly withdrawing and resubmitting rather than risk a refusal on record. For developers underwriting land purchases, this extends the "optionality" period on sites and pushes real delivery timelines further to the right, even when a scheme eventually gets consent.

What this means for developers, lenders and investors

A widening gap between proposed and approved units has knock-on effects across the value chain REalyse's users operate in:

• Development appraisals: Longer, less certain paths to consent increase holding costs and erode residual land values, particularly for mid-market sites without strategic land backing.

• Debt underwriting: Lenders assessing development finance should treat planning status as a live risk variable, not a static milestone. REalyse's planning pipeline data by local authority can help credit teams flag areas where refusal and withdrawal rates are trending up.

• Investment sourcing: Institutional investors targeting build-to-rent or forward-funded schemes may find fewer investable, planning-secured opportunities than raw application counts would suggest, reinforcing the premium on sites with consent already in hand.

• Local authority benchmarking: Comparing approval rates and average decision times by council area, achievable through REalyse's local authority and planning application comparables, can help identify which markets are delivering pipeline reliably and which are becoming bottlenecks.

Outlook

The direction of travel suggests England's planning system is increasingly a story of scale and selectivity rather than broad-based throughput. Government reforms aimed at speeding up decisions and increasing local authority planning capacity may narrow this gap over the next 12–18 months, but the current data suggests the effects have yet to show up in approval rates.

For now, developers and their lending and investment partners should treat rising proposed unit numbers as a signal of ambition, not a proxy for future completions. The properties and sites most likely to convert into deliverable stock will be those with planning history, local authority track record and scheme scale that REalyse's comparables and planning data can help identify before capital is committed.