Planning approval rates rose across London while England barely moved
Change in recorded planning approval rates, 2021 to 2025
Recorded approval rate: approvals as a share of applications approved or refused. Official figures: MHCLG district planning statistics, June 2026 release. Changes are calculated from unrounded rates.
Recorded planning approval rates rose across much of London between 2021 and 2025, while some of the sharpest falls were in councils outside the capital. Across England, the rate barely moved.
Official figures show that 86.6% of planning applications decided in England in 2025 were approved, compared with 87.9% in 2021. That is a fall of 1.3 percentage points. Across 30 London boroughs the official rate rose by 2.9 points, from 78.4% to 81.3%.
PlanningLens, which collects decisions from council planning records, found the same London rise. Across the same 30 boroughs, its recorded rate went from 78.9% to 82.2%, up 3.3 points. The results were checked against the official figures, and the method and the claims this analysis would make were registered before any of it was written.
Twelve London boroughs up by five points or more
Recorded rates rose in 21 of the 30 boroughs in PlanningLens records and fell in 8. Havering’s was 74.9% in both years. Official figures show rises in 17 of the 30.
Twelve boroughs rose by five points or more in PlanningLens records. Hillingdon rose furthest, from 69.9% to 85.5%, followed by Brent (66.7% to 77.8%) and Bexley (78.8% to 89.1%). Official figures show all twelve rising too.
Bromley went the other way. Its recorded rate fell from 81.9% to 71.8%, the only London borough to drop by five points or more. Official figures show Bromley down 8.6 points.
| Borough | PlanningLens 2021 | PlanningLens 2025 | Change (points) | Official 2025 | Official change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hillingdon | 69.9 | 85.5 | +15.6 | 83.7 | +16.0 |
| Brent | 66.7 | 77.8 | +11.2 | 79.8 | +13.3 |
| Bexley | 78.8 | 89.1 | +10.2 | 89.3 | +8.7 |
| Hackney* | 73.9 | 83.7 | +9.8 | 82.3 | +8.3 |
| Sutton | 76.8 | 86.6 | +9.8 | 88.4 | +11.6 |
| Lewisham | 73.8 | 83.5 | +9.7 | 84.9 | +8.8 |
| Hammersmith & Fulham | 85.6 | 94.1 | +8.6 | 98.0 | +10.9 |
| Enfield | 72.2 | 79.6 | +7.4 | 78.6 | +10.3 |
| Greenwich | 69.2 | 75.0 | +5.8 | 77.0 | +6.7 |
| Haringey | 80.5 | 86.0 | +5.6 | 86.0 | +3.3 |
| Croydon | 71.7 | 77.3 | +5.6 | 74.4 | +7.1 |
| Kensington & Chelsea | 88.2 | 93.7 | +5.5 | 93.1 | +6.1 |
| Islington | 84.0 | 88.1 | +4.1 | 90.7 | +9.9 |
| Tower Hamlets | 77.1 | 80.8 | +3.7 | 81.0 | +3.0 |
| Newham | 78.1 | 81.7 | +3.6 | 79.2 | −2.2 |
| Redbridge | 75.7 | 78.1 | +2.4 | 74.0 | +1.3 |
| Barking & Dagenham† | 71.8 | 73.6 | +1.9 | 64.9 | −0.8 |
| Barnet | 77.0 | 78.4 | +1.4 | 76.3 | −5.1 |
| Southwark | 92.0 | 93.2 | +1.2 | 92.1 | +0.8 |
| Ealing | 84.7 | 85.6 | +0.9 | 84.9 | +2.1 |
| Harrow | 77.8 | 78.5 | +0.6 | 77.5 | −2.4 |
| Havering | 74.9 | 74.9 | 0.0 | 72.6 | −0.8 |
| Camden | 88.7 | 87.5 | −1.2 | 88.8 | −1.0 |
| Kingston | 74.9 | 73.5 | −1.4 | 75.0 | −1.7 |
| Merton | 85.3 | 83.4 | −1.9 | 87.6 | −0.6 |
| Hounslow† | 76.2 | 74.2 | −2.0 | 67.1 | −3.9 |
| Westminster | 89.8 | 87.2 | −2.6 | 84.0 | −4.1 |
| Waltham Forest | 76.4 | 72.2 | −4.2 | 73.7 | −4.4 |
| Lambeth | 84.3 | 79.5 | −4.8 | 80.1 | −4.2 |
| Bromley | 81.9 | 71.8 | −10.1 | 75.1 | −8.6 |
* Hackney’s PlanningLens records include more procedural entries in 2025, and duplicate records were removed. The official figures show a similar rise.
† PlanningLens rates for Barking & Dagenham and Hounslow sit 7 to 9 points above the official 2025 figures. They are shown for completeness and are not ranked.
Richmond and Wandsworth are not in this table: both failed the validation rule’s check against official figures (see Excluded boroughs).
Official figures: MHCLG PS2, major, minor, change-of-use and householder decisions, June 2026 release.
The largest falls were outside London
The five largest falls among the 133 councils in the analysis were all outside London. In Oadby and Wigston, in Leicestershire, the recorded rate fell 17.9 points, to 71.8%. It is a small council, deciding about 300 applications a year. Warrington, Dartford, Doncaster and Slough each fell by more than 10 points. Official figures record a fall in all five.
In Slough the recorded rate fell in every year from 2020, from 86.3% to 75.1% in 2025.
| Council | PlanningLens 2021 | PlanningLens 2025 | Change (points) | Official 2021 | Official 2025 | Official change | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oadby & Wigston | 89.7 | 71.8 | −17.9 | 91.6 | 70.8 | −20.8 | Small council: about 300 decisions a year |
| Warrington | 90.3 | 77.9 | −12.3 | 91.1 | 76.3 | −14.8 | Decision dates in PlanningLens records flagged for checking |
| Dartford | 90.9 | 80.3 | −10.5 | 92.7 | 80.3 | −12.5 | No quality flags |
| Doncaster | 95.5 | 85.3 | −10.2 | 93.8 | 85.7 | −8.0 | PlanningLens holds only 10 months of 2025 decisions |
| Slough | 85.2 | 75.1 | −10.1 | 87.1 | 76.1 | −11.0 | No quality flags. Fell every year from 2020 |
Notes describe PlanningLens’s own records. Official figures record a similar fall in each case.
A flat national picture
Nationally, the change was small. Among the 133 councils, as many rose by five points or more as fell by that much: 21 each. The typical council’s rate slipped by 0.7 points.
The number of decisions fell in both datasets, by 32% in the official figures. This analysis is about approval rates, not volumes.
What the figures cannot show
A recorded approval rate is the share of decided applications that were approved. It moves with the kind of applications a council receives, how applicants and agents behave, advice given before an application is made, withdrawals, changes to permitted development rules and the way decisions are recorded, as well as with the decisions themselves. These figures cannot say why any council’s rate rose or fell.
How this analysis works
The measure
A recorded approval rate is approvals as a share of approvals plus refusals. Withdrawn applications, undated records and procedural entries are not counted as decisions.
PlanningLens figures
Decisions collected from council planning records and dated by decision date. Councils were included if their records passed quality rules fixed in advance and held at least 200 substantive decisions in both 2021 and 2025. That gave 135 councils. Richmond and Wandsworth were then excluded, as set out below. The analysis covers the remaining 133 councils, 30 of them London boroughs. The City of London is not included.
Official figures
MHCLG district planning application statistics (PS2): decisions on major, minor, change-of-use and householder applications, summed over the four quarters of each calendar year and matched to councils by official code. The figures come from the June 2026 release. Its September 2026 update revised two boroughs by less than 0.03 points and changes no finding.
Why the two sources differ
PlanningLens counts prior-approval decisions for permitted development and some decisions classified from their descriptions. The official PS2 return does not include prior approvals. Levels are therefore not expected to match exactly, and the comparison checks direction and broad level. In 28 of the 30 boroughs, the PlanningLens 2025 rate is within five points of the official figure. Barking & Dagenham and Hounslow sit 7 to 9 points higher, so they are shown but not ranked.
Excluded boroughs
Two London boroughs in the PlanningLens panel failed the validation rule’s check against official figures and are excluded from every figure in this article.
Richmond (Richmond upon Thames): in 2025 PlanningLens recorded 96.5% against an official 79.5%, failing the level test. Its PlanningLens records show a 2025 change in how decisions were recorded.
Wandsworth: PlanningLens recorded a rise of 7.0 points where official figures show a fall of 2.6 points, failing the direction test. PlanningLens holds 465 decisions for 2021 against 3,448 for 2025.
Both remain in the comparison download, marked as excluded, and the validation rule is published unchanged.
Flags
Hackney’s PlanningLens records include more procedural entries in 2025, and duplicate records were removed. The official figures show a similar rise. Warrington, Doncaster and Oadby and Wigston carry quality flags on their PlanningLens records, set out in the table notes. Official figures record similar falls in each.
Volumes
Official decisions of these types in England fell from 387,474 in 2021 to 262,197 in 2025. PlanningLens decisions across the 133 councils fell from 200,112 to 153,189.
The pooled PlanningLens figure
Pooled across all 133 councils, the PlanningLens rate moved from 84.9% to 85.4%. London accounts for about 41% of the decisions in this panel but 15 to 18% of official decisions in England, so this pooled figure is not a national estimate. The national figure in this article is the official one.
Rounding
Rates are rounded to one decimal place. Changes are calculated from unrounded rates, so a change can differ by 0.1 from the gap between the two rounded rates shown.
The spread across the 133 councils
Change in each council’s recorded approval rate, 2021 to 2025, PlanningLens records.
| Change | Councils |
|---|---|
| Fell 10 points or more | 6 |
| Fell 5 to 10 points | 15 |
| Fell 2 to 5 points | 25 |
| Moved less than 2 points | 53 |
| Rose 2 to 5 points | 13 |
| Rose 5 to 10 points | 18 |
| Rose 10 points or more | 3 |
| All councils | 133 |
The middle council moved by −0.7 points. Half of all councils moved between −3.4 and +2.2 points.
Data and downloads
- Comparison with official figures (CSV). Every borough and council in the official check, including Richmond and Wandsworth, with a column showing whether each is included in this analysis and, if not, why.
- The validation rule (text). The tests fixed before the official check was run, published unchanged.
- England national check (text). The official England calculation with decision counts, published unchanged.
- Change for each of the 133 councils (CSV). Decisions, approvals and rates for 2021 and 2025.
- About these files (text). What each column means, and a fingerprint for each file.
Questions and answers
Did planning approval rates change in England between 2021 and 2025?
Barely. Official figures show 87.9% of decided planning applications in England were approved in 2021 and 86.6% in 2025, a fall of 1.3 percentage points.
Did approval rates rise in London?
Yes, overall. Across 30 London boroughs the official rate rose from 78.4% to 81.3%, up 2.9 points, and PlanningLens records show a rise of 3.3 points. Rates rose in 21 of the 30 boroughs in PlanningLens records and in 17 of the 30 in official figures. Twelve boroughs rose by five points or more in PlanningLens records, and official figures show all twelve rising.
Which councils saw the biggest falls?
In the PlanningLens analysis of 133 councils, the five largest falls were in Oadby and Wigston (17.9 points), Warrington (12.3), Dartford (10.5), Doncaster (10.2) and Slough (10.1). All are outside London, and official figures record a fall in each.
Why did approval rates change?
The figures cannot say. Recorded approval rates move with the mix of applications, how applicants and agents behave, advice before applications are made, withdrawals, changes to permitted development rules and how decisions are recorded.
What is a recorded approval rate?
The share of decided applications that were approved: approvals divided by approvals plus refusals. Withdrawn applications and procedural records are not counted as decisions.
Where do the figures come from?
Official figures are from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s district planning application statistics (PS2), June 2026 release. PlanningLens figures come from council planning records collected by PlanningLens.
Sources
- Live tables on planning application statistics, GOV.UK
- Planning applications in England: January to March 2026, statistical release, GOV.UK, 19 June 2026
- Planning applications in England: April to June 2026, GOV.UK, 24 September 2026
- PlanningLens records of council planning decisions, 133 councils in England