Committee vs delegated: who decides UK planning applications, and does it change the outcome?
In the 98 councils that publish the decision route, 2.3% of planning decisions were made by elected councillors. When they were, the approval rate dropped.
Quote freely with attribution to PlanningLens and a link to this page.
Why this matters now: the National Scheme of Delegation
England's National Scheme of Delegation of Planning Functions comes into force on 31 October 2026, under the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 and the Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026. From that date every English local planning authority must delegate a national list of application types to officers, including householder and minor applications, section 73 variations, reserved matters and prior approvals; councillor call-ins on those categories end, and planning committees are capped at 13 members. The figures on this page are therefore a pre-reform baseline: how often applications reached committee, and how outcomes differed by route, while councils still set their own schemes of delegation. The scheme applies to England only; councils elsewhere in the UK that appear in the table are unaffected by it. PlanningLens will preserve the pre-reform figures and re-run this comparison once the scheme has been in force long enough to measure.
The two routes: delegated and committee decisions
Every planning application is decided one of two ways. Most are delegated: a case officer decides them under powers the council has handed to its planning department. The rest go to planning committee, where elected councillors vote. That usually happens when objections pass a threshold, when the scheme departs from the local plan, or when a ward councillor calls it in. Official statistics already report how often decisions are delegated: MHCLG's quarterly returns record delegated decisions for each English authority, and the national share has sat at about 96% since 2014. There is no standardised public UK dataset combining decision route and outcome at council level. The PlanningLens register records both the route and the outcome wherever councils publish them, which is what makes the comparison on this page possible.
What the route data shows
Across the 98 councils where the route is recorded, 97.7% of decisions were delegated to officers and 2.3% went to committee. Officers approved 89.2% of the applications they decided. Committees approved 81.2%. That puts 7.9 points between the two routes.
The committee share is not a national estimate. MHCLG's figures put England as a whole at 96% delegated for January to March 2026, so about 4% of decisions nationally are made at committee. The 98 councils that publish the route are not a random sample of the register's 309 councils, and their committee share sits below the national figure. The approval-rate comparison, which needs both the route and the outcome for each decision, is what this page adds.
Why the gap is not what it looks like
The obvious reading is that committees are tougher. The more accurate one is that committees see tougher cases. The routing selects for conflict: schemes with objections, departures and call-ins are the ones that get sent to members, so the committee pile is loaded with contested applications before anyone votes. The gap says as much about what reaches committee as it does about the people deciding it. For an applicant the practical point is simpler. If your scheme is heading to committee, the approval base rate is lower, and your own council's committee numbers are worth knowing before the meeting, not after.
Committee vs delegated rates by council
The table lists councils with at least 100 route-recorded decisions and at least 50 committee decisions, sorted by the size of the gap. The committee rate is the volatile one: at 50 committee decisions a single decision moves it by 2 points, and the Gap column moves with it, so the Committee N column is there to be read alongside every rate. The CSV below carries every council with route data, whatever its sample size, and flags which rows meet this threshold.
Route records for eleven of the 98 councils in this comparison stop more than 90 days before the newest; Sevenoaks's stops in January 2024. Stale rows in the table are marked with their data date, and the CSV carries a date for every council.
| Council | Decisions | To committee | Committee N | Delegated approval | Committee approval | Gap (pts) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Windsor & Maidenhead | 6,710 | 1.3% | 86 | 85.3% | 64.0% | +21.3 |
| North East Derbyshire · data to Mar 2026 | 6,407 | 3.2% | 207 | 91.2% | 70.0% | +21.2 |
| East Cambridgeshire | 10,923 | 3.3% | 360 | 91.1% | 71.7% | +19.4 |
| Derby · data to Mar 2026 | 2,761 | 2.0% | 54 | 93.2% | 74.1% | +19.1 |
| Cotswold | 23,101 | 1.2% | 268 | 95.8% | 78.0% | +17.8 |
| New Forest | 9,781 | 4.8% | 469 | 89.5% | 72.1% | +17.4 |
| Basingstoke & Deane | 9,253 | 4.3% | 396 | 92.1% | 74.7% | +17.4 |
| Horsham | 12,454 | 2.3% | 288 | 91.6% | 75.0% | +16.6 |
| West Oxfordshire | 6,195 | 3.4% | 209 | 94.5% | 78.0% | +16.5 |
| Bath & NE Somerset · data to Mar 2026 | 24,967 | 3.0% | 758 | 92.2% | 75.9% | +16.3 |
| Winchester | 6,649 | 2.5% | 167 | 95.4% | 79.6% | +15.8 |
| Newark & Sherwood | 10,511 | 3.0% | 312 | 88.6% | 72.8% | +15.8 |
| Sevenoaks · data to Jan 2024 | 12,651 | 1.2% | 150 | 86.9% | 71.3% | +15.6 |
| Solihull | 4,491 | 3.1% | 139 | 93.3% | 77.7% | +15.6 |
| Kingston upon Hull | 5,916 | 3.9% | 229 | 90.0% | 75.1% | +14.9 |
| Isle of Wight | 13,393 | 0.8% | 102 | 88.0% | 73.5% | +14.5 |
| Wakefield | 12,658 | 0.9% | 114 | 89.9% | 75.4% | +14.5 |
| Calderdale | 12,697 | 2.2% | 273 | 87.6% | 73.6% | +14.0 |
| County Durham | 6,293 | 5.5% | 347 | 89.9% | 76.1% | +13.8 |
| North Tyneside | 5,755 | 2.3% | 130 | 94.7% | 82.3% | +12.4 |
| East Lothian | 247 | 21.5% | 53 | 99.0% | 86.8% | +12.2 |
| Forest of Dean | 3,082 | 6.1% | 188 | 89.1% | 77.1% | +12.0 |
| King's Lynn & West Norfolk | 1,992 | 4.6% | 91 | 93.3% | 81.3% | +12.0 |
| North East Lincolnshire | 3,073 | 10.1% | 311 | 95.2% | 83.6% | +11.6 |
| Gateshead | 6,338 | 5.2% | 329 | 94.0% | 82.4% | +11.6 |
| Buckinghamshire | 25,337 | 1.4% | 351 | 85.4% | 74.4% | +11.0 |
| Brentwood | 11,761 | 1.1% | 131 | 83.2% | 72.5% | +10.7 |
| Dover · data to Dec 2025 | 6,417 | 3.5% | 224 | 93.2% | 83.0% | +10.2 |
| North Somerset | 19,129 | 0.8% | 145 | 90.2% | 80.7% | +9.5 |
| Stroud | 8,588 | 1.1% | 97 | 90.8% | 81.4% | +9.4 |
| Medway | 10,257 | 3.8% | 391 | 88.4% | 79.5% | +8.9 |
| South Downs | 10,654 | 1.6% | 167 | 93.3% | 84.4% | +8.9 |
| Cheltenham | 13,616 | 2.8% | 382 | 96.2% | 87.4% | +8.8 |
| Sefton | 6,894 | 1.8% | 124 | 88.5% | 79.8% | +8.7 |
| Maldon | 3,988 | 7.2% | 286 | 76.1% | 67.8% | +8.3 |
| North Norfolk | 2,101 | 2.5% | 53 | 95.0% | 86.8% | +8.2 |
| Rushcliffe | 7,533 | 2.3% | 173 | 89.1% | 80.9% | +8.2 |
| Bristol | 24,821 | 1.1% | 276 | 86.9% | 79.0% | +7.9 |
| Torridge | 8,075 | 3.3% | 263 | 93.4% | 85.6% | +7.8 |
| York | 9,454 | 2.6% | 242 | 90.0% | 82.2% | +7.8 |
| Exeter | 6,406 | 1.4% | 92 | 90.7% | 83.7% | +7.0 |
| Sheffield | 5,361 | 1.7% | 90 | 90.1% | 83.3% | +6.8 |
| Selby | 5,648 | 3.9% | 223 | 83.4% | 76.7% | +6.7 |
| Mid Sussex | 7,947 | 1.8% | 147 | 94.0% | 87.8% | +6.2 |
| Glasgow | 18,631 | 1.5% | 277 | 88.9% | 83.4% | +5.5 |
| Oxford | 5,657 | 2.0% | 114 | 91.5% | 86.0% | +5.5 |
| Portsmouth · data to Mar 2026 | 8,450 | 7.4% | 627 | 88.0% | 83.4% | +4.6 |
| Bromsgrove & Redditch | 1,925 | 4.7% | 90 | 93.2% | 88.9% | +4.3 |
| Cheshire West & Chester | 15,974 | 0.9% | 147 | 92.0% | 87.8% | +4.2 |
| Tameside | 2,307 | 3.1% | 71 | 86.4% | 83.1% | +3.3 |
| Tewkesbury | 6,449 | 5.5% | 355 | 91.2% | 87.9% | +3.3 |
| Wigan | 4,553 | 1.8% | 80 | 89.5% | 86.2% | +3.3 |
| Hart | 10,021 | 1.1% | 115 | 85.7% | 82.6% | +3.1 |
| Test Valley | 5,658 | 2.6% | 145 | 91.4% | 89.0% | +2.4 |
| Cambridge | 5,183 | 3.1% | 159 | 90.8% | 88.7% | +2.1 |
| Epsom & Ewell | 8,099 | 1.6% | 128 | 88.0% | 85.9% | +2.1 |
| Norwich | 8,216 | 3.9% | 320 | 92.7% | 90.9% | +1.8 |
| Brighton & Hove · data to Mar 2025 | 2,768 | 3.1% | 87 | 88.9% | 87.4% | +1.5 |
| South Gloucestershire | 13,675 | 1.8% | 252 | 86.0% | 84.9% | +1.1 |
| Chesterfield | 4,662 | 8.2% | 382 | 90.3% | 89.5% | +0.8 |
| Sunderland | 10,486 | 5.5% | 576 | 88.5% | 88.5% | +0.0 |
| Trafford · data to Dec 2025 | 12,281 | 2.9% | 359 | 87.4% | 87.5% | -0.1 |
| Dartford | 7,141 | 1.8% | 131 | 88.1% | 88.5% | -0.4 |
| Knowsley | 4,162 | 3.0% | 125 | 94.4% | 96.0% | -1.6 |
| Nottingham | 6,211 | 0.8% | 52 | 93.6% | 96.2% | -2.6 |
| Hastings | 5,833 | 3.7% | 218 | 86.3% | 89.0% | -2.7 |
| Gloucester | 3,741 | 2.4% | 88 | 84.8% | 88.6% | -3.8 |
| Darlington | 2,331 | 3.0% | 71 | 91.7% | 95.8% | -4.1 |
| Lichfield | 2,617 | 2.7% | 71 | 84.6% | 91.5% | -6.9 |
| Leeds | 39,020 | 0.5% | 192 | 84.9% | 92.7% | -7.8 |
| East Hertfordshire | 16,638 | 0.9% | 150 | 73.0% | 92.0% | -19.0 |
Methodology
Source: the PlanningLens register of 3.82M+ UK planning decisions, scraped nightly from council portals. The decision route is captured where the council publishes it, and this page covers the 98 councils that do. Rates are decision-weighted. We divide total approvals by total decisions for each route rather than averaging council averages, so large councils count for more, as they should. The table applies the thresholds above. The CSV carries every council with route data and shows the sample sizes, so you can set your own cut-off.
Coverage: each council's route record runs through its own data date, which falls between 24 January 2024 and 10 September 2026 across the 98 councils (1 carry no date and are read as running to their latest published decision); the CSV gives each council's date. How far back each council's route record reaches depends on how much history its portal publishes, and that varies from council to council; no adjustment is made for it, so read council-to-council comparisons with each council's sample size and data date to hand. The publication date at the top of the page is fixed; the figures are recomputed from the register every night, and the data date beside it moves with the register.
Download the data
committee vs delegated rates by council (CSV). The file lists every covered council with both routes, the underlying totals, each council's data date and whether it meets the table threshold. Licence CC BY 4.0 with attribution to PlanningLens.
Need the underlying decisions for a council or a date range? PlanningLens supplies bulk data extracts and API access.
Frequently asked questions
What is a delegated planning decision?
A decision made by a council's planning officers under delegated powers, without going to committee. Most UK planning decisions are made this way: 97.7% in the 98 councils covered here, and 96% across England in MHCLG's figures for January to March 2026.
What is the National Scheme of Delegation?
A national list, set by government, of which planning applications English councils must delegate to officers and which may still go to committee. It comes into force on 31 October 2026 under the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, replacing each council's own scheme of delegation for the categories it covers and capping planning committees at 13 members. It applies to England only. The figures on this page describe the position before it takes effect.
Do planning committees refuse more applications than officers?
In this data, yes. Committee decisions were approved at 81.2% against 89.2% for delegated decisions, a gap of 7.9 points. That does not mean councillors are harsher than officers. Contentious applications are sent to committee in the first place, so committees decide a harder mix of cases.
What percentage of planning applications go to committee?
2.3% of route-recorded decisions across 98 UK councils were decided at committee. The rest were delegated to officers.
Is it better for an application to be decided by committee or delegated?
Applicants do not usually get to choose. Delegated decisions carry the higher approval rate in this data, but the route reflects how contested a scheme is rather than a lever you can pull. What you can influence is what sends schemes to committee in the first place, principally objection numbers, so early consultation with neighbours and a scheme that sits inside policy do more for your odds than the route itself.
Why do some applications go to planning committee?
The usual triggers are objection numbers passing a threshold, applications made by the council or its own members, schemes that depart from the local plan, and call-ins by ward councillors. The cases that reach committee are the contested ones, which is one reason their approval rate is lower.