ABOUT THE FILES: Planning approval rates rose across London while England barely moved
PlanningLens, published 25 September 2026. Page: https://planninglens.co.uk/planning-approval-rates-london-2021-2025

FILES
1. planning-approval-rates-london-2021-2025-official-comparison.csv
   Every borough and council in the 20 September 2026 check against official MHCLG figures:
   32 London boroughs and 5 councils outside London (37 rows). It is the frozen comparison file
   with two columns added:
     candidate_a_included  yes / no. Richmond and Wandsworth are "no": both failed the
                           pre-registered check and are excluded from every figure in the article.
     exclusion_reason      the test each failed, with the figures.
   The frozen source (sha256 2cf87f06e62f385bc20f02ffce22b1f78ad8cd829b0d49e1da3e4243f158b210)
   is kept unchanged by PlanningLens. Every other value in this file is identical to it.
   Key columns:
     PL_2021, PL_2025, PL_move_pp   PlanningLens recorded approval rate (%) and change (points)
                                    as input to the check, at 1 or 2 decimal places. The article's
                                    PlanningLens figures are exact recalculations from file 4, so
                                    a few differ by 0.1.
     CORE_2021, CORE_2025           official PS2 rate (%): major, minor, change of use and householder
                                    decisions, four quarters of each calendar year, at 2 decimal places.
     CORE_N2021, CORE_N2025         official decisions; CORE_granted2025 and CORE_refused2025 give
                                    the exact 2025 rate. The article rounds exact rates to 1 decimal
                                    place.
     ALL_*                          official all-types figures, for reference only.
     level_test, direction_test,    results of the pre-registered tests in file 2.
     assessment
2. planning-approval-rates-london-2021-2025-validation-rule.txt
   The validation rule fixed before the official check was run. Published unchanged
   (sha256 c705063a4f315e2ac77fc4958ac313f72185d19626f2f2782b02fa5ed007fec5).
3. planning-approval-rates-london-2021-2025-england-official-check.txt
   The official England calculation (receipt of 20 September 2026). Published unchanged
   (sha256 479d035fb798416ada09baba7949c72031cebf6a20189756306c7a5062b907ba).
4. planning-approval-rates-london-2021-2025-133-councils.csv
   The 133 councils in the analysis: decisions (N), approvals (A), refusals (R) and recorded
   approval rates for 2021 and 2025, change in points, and the cohort (London-30 or
   rest-of-England). Barking & Dagenham and Hounslow are marked as not ranked. Published
   unchanged (sha256 7956c3b8c55322695a9783901be8d6a074b4755b5f74c92e5498c65be37bbf4f).

OFFICIAL SOURCE
MHCLG, District planning application statistics (PS2), full dataset, June 2026 release
(PS2_data_-_open_data_table__202603_.csv, sha256 2bfd2293b5354bd39f07039206f604ac6b613ac94b1211c82371e27933a650bf).
Live tables: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-planning-application-statistics
The September 2026 update (April to June 2026 data) revised two boroughs by less than 0.03 points
and changes no finding: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/planning-applications-in-england-april-to-june-2026
Official data: Open Government Licence v3.0.