Correction: how we calculate the planning approval rate
Published 12 September 2026
PlanningLens has changed how it calculates the planning approval rate. The national figure moves from 88.58% to 87.43%, a fall of 1.15 percentage points.
The old figure counted every decision in our records. That included work that is not a decision about whether development may proceed: listed building consent, tree works, advertisement consent, lawful development certificates, discharges of planning conditions and non-material amendments. These are approved at very high rates, so including them pushed the approval rate up.
We now count substantive development-control decisions only. There are 2,698,861 of them, of which 2,359,515 were approved and 339,346 refused.
Two other faults were corrected at the same time. Where an appeal or review was dismissed, our records had sometimes overridden the council's own approval and recorded a refusal. That affected 140 decisions and has been reversed. Separately, a set of decision wordings had been read incorrectly, and those values have been corrected council by council.
The record count and the approval rate now answer different questions. We hold 3.8 million planning records. The approval rate is calculated across the 2,698,861 of those that are substantive decisions. The two figures should never be quoted as a pair.
The effect varies by council. Some local rates change materially, which is why we have rebuilt the council-level figures and applied new quality checks before publishing comparisons.
Our council ranking now covers England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are outside it until we can validate their coverage against an equivalent official source. This is a limit on what we can verify, not a judgement about the quality of their data.
For 43 councils we are withholding the headline approval rate. In most cases the published record does not carry enough usable decision-date information for us to establish that our coverage is complete and current. In others, refusals appear materially undercaptured. This does not mean the percentage we previously showed has been proved wrong. We do not substitute an official statistic in its place.
Councils with the headline rate withheld
| Council | Reason |
|---|---|
| Aberdeen | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Aberdeenshire | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Adur & Worthing | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Angus | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Argyll & Bute | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Arun | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Birmingham | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Cairngorms NP | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Cardiff | store coverage: approvals materially undercaptured |
| Carlisle | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Ceredigion | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| City of Edinburgh | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Dacorum | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Dartmoor NPA | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Dumfries & Galloway | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Dundee | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| East Lothian | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Falkirk | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Fareham | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Fife | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Gosport | dual-warning quality hold |
| Harlow | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Highland | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Liverpool | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Mansfield | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Mid Devon | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Moray | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Newport | store coverage: approvals materially undercaptured |
| North Ayrshire | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| North Kesteven | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| North Lanarkshire | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| North York Moors | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Orkney | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Perth & Kinross | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| South Lanarkshire | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| South Tyneside | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Southampton | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| St Helens | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| Stirling | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Thanet | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| Torridge | decision-date coverage below 20% |
| West Lancashire | refusal capture below 0.5 of official |
| West Lothian | decision-date coverage below 20% |
Methodology basis
The approval rate is calculated across substantive development-control decisions only. The record count is a coverage claim and uses a different denominator. The two are never quoted as a pair.