BLOGS

A pipeline gathering pace

Large-scale, multi-thousand-unit schemes have quietly become one of the most consistent features of the UK development landscape. Projects like the 4,115-home Elms Park scheme near Cheltenham sit alongside a broader cohort of major urban extensions, regeneration masterplans and, increasingly, formally designated new towns — all moving through planning at a pace that has surprised even seasoned market watchers.

The policy backdrop matters here. Government consultations on a new generation of new towns, alongside proposals to hand more decision-making power to combined authorities and mayors through delegated planning powers, are designed to unblock exactly this kind of large-scale delivery. For institutional investors and developers, the practical question is less about policy intent and more about where the pipeline is actually converting into deliverable, financeable schemes — and REalyse's planning application data offers a granular way to answer that.

What the pipeline data shows

Looking at residential and mixed-use planning applications of 500 units or more across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, REalyse data shows this is not a niche segment. Large schemes of this size collectively account for tens of thousands of proposed units per region in several parts of the country, with individual local authority areas — North and West Northamptonshire among them — each carrying multiple schemes worth hundreds of millions of pounds in combined value.

The East Midlands is a useful illustration of how concentrated this activity can be. REalyse data shows a cluster of large schemes with a combined value running into the billions of pounds sitting "in progress" at local authorities such as North Northamptonshire, West Northamptonshire, South Kesteven and Newark and Sherwood — corridors that sit along key transport links and have historically offered more permissive land supply than the greenbelt-constrained South East. This pattern is consistent with what the new towns programme is explicitly targeting: places with land availability, infrastructure capacity and political appetite for growth at scale.

Crucially, the data also captures the full lifecycle of these schemes — from submission and "in progress" status through to granted decisions, project completion, and the schemes that stall or are withdrawn. That decision-to-completion conversion rate is arguably more useful to underwriting teams than headline unit counts alone, since it points to which authorities are translating pipeline into delivered stock versus those where schemes remain stuck in the system for years.

Reading the regional signal

For investors screening deployment locations, the value of this data is less about any single flagship scheme and more about the clustering effect. Where REalyse data shows multiple large schemes concentrated within the same local authority or travel-to-work area, that typically signals:

• Land assembly and infrastructure investment already underway, reducing site-specific delivery risk

• Established developer and contractor relationships that can support phased or accelerated build-out

• A future supply wave that will shape medium-term price and rent growth assumptions for existing stock nearby

This is where comparables and market data become essential companions to planning pipeline data. A 4,000-home scheme entering a district with limited existing sold £/sqft evidence and thin transaction volumes carries different pricing risk to the same scheme landing in a market with deep, liquid comparables. Lenders assessing development finance and investors underwriting forward-funding deals should be triangulating planning pipeline scale against local absorption rates, achieved sales pricing and rental demand — not treating unit numbers in isolation.

Delegated powers and the speed question

The proposed shift toward delegated planning powers for combined authorities is aimed squarely at the biggest friction point in large-scale delivery: speed of decision-making. Schemes of the scale seen in the new towns pipeline routinely take years to move from submission to first units on site, and REalyse's planning stage data shows a meaningful share of large applications sitting in "in progress" or "status pending" categories for extended periods, with some ultimately refused or withdrawn after significant pre-application investment.

If delegated powers succeed in compressing that timeline even modestly, the effect on deliverable supply — and on the appraisal assumptions developers build into land value — could be significant. For now, the safest approach for professional users is to track planning stage transitions at the local authority level rather than assume headline "consultation" announcements translate quickly into shovels in the ground.

Where to watch next

Beyond the Cheltenham and Northamptonshire growth corridors, the same dynamics — available land, transport infrastructure, and local authorities willing to allocate strategic sites — are visible in pockets of Yorkshire, the West Midlands and parts of Scotland's central belt, where REalyse data shows large-scheme activity building alongside more traditional urban extension projects. None of these has yet reached the scale of the flagship new towns proposals, but the underlying pipeline metrics — units proposed, scheme value, and planning stage progression — are the earliest indicators of where the next wave of hotspots will consolidate.

For developers and investors, the message is straightforward: don't wait for a site to be formally branded a "new town" before treating it as strategic. The planning pipeline data already shows where land is moving, value is concentrating, and decisions are converting into delivery — and that is where site sourcing, comparables work and underwriting should be focused now.