Original analysis drawn from 3,850,000+ real planning decisions across 310 UK planning authorities. Each briefing is published here in full, with a designed PDF for print and citation.
Applications for two-storey extensions fell 45% between 2021 and 2025 in 77 English councils, with falls in 74 of 75 comparable councils.
Official figures show England's recorded approval rate down 1.3 points between 2021 and 2025, while across 30 London boroughs it rose 2.9 points. The sharpest falls in PlanningLens records were outside the capital.
PlanningLens analysed 106,988 householder decisions across 25 English councils. 21.1% were issued exactly 56 days after validation, almost six times the surrounding-day rate.
Whitehall says its AI will take householder planning decisions from eight weeks to four. The measured starting line: a median of 7.71 weeks across 7,663 decisions in Barnet, Camden and Dorset, against a matched panel of 16 control councils frozen before any outcome existed.
Outside heavily Green Belt areas, councils below 75% on the Housing Delivery Test approved 81% of major housing decisions. Councils at 95% or above also approved 81%. In heavily Green Belt areas the picture was markedly different.
Northern Ireland has sunrooms, England has conservatories. Scotland says attic, London says loft. Suffolk builds cart lodges. What 4,556,475 UK planning application descriptions reveal about local words for buildings, extensions and places.
Article 4 directions stripping permitted development rights from small HMOs are spreading across England: borough-wide, countywide, immediate and pre-emptive. What the verified register shows, what the appeals record shows, and why the rewritten NPPF cuts against the very form the wave has taken.
The statutory answer is eight weeks. The measured answer, from millions of council portal records, is longer almost everywhere. Decision times for every ranked UK council and project type, with league tables, the trend since 2019 and the full method. Every figure regenerates with the data.
England is deciding nearly twice as many HMO applications as four years ago and refusing a sharply rising share of them. Where the squeeze bites, and what the data does and does not show about the link everyone assumes.
How a cathedral city became one of the slowest places in England to extend a home, and where inside it applications are most likely to be refused.