The Home Builders Federation and Paragon Bank published a report this month called Planning on Empty. Nine in ten local planning authorities in England and Wales are running below the staffing they say they need, at an average of 80% of required capacity.
The number worth sitting with is the direction. Councils now need an estimated 2,660 more planners to reach full capacity. Last year the estimate was 2,200. The gap grew by a fifth over a period when government had put almost £100m into planning capacity and committed to recruiting 1,400 more planners this Parliament.
Money went in and the shortfall got bigger.
I wanted to see what that looks like at street level, so we pulled the planning records we hold at Propalt for three outcodes in three different councils. LS6 in Leeds, BS6 in Bristol, NG7 in Nottingham. 503 applications lodged in the first half of 2025. Fourteen to twenty months on, 171 of them still have no decision recorded. A third.
Then the part I did not expect. Of the ones that were decided, half were done inside 54 days. Comfortably within the statutory window.
So on those patches the shortage does not present as slow decisions. It presents as applications that never get one.
That distinction carries a trap, and it is worth naming because the trap runs in the flattering direction. Any average decision time is calculated only over applications that finished. In Leeds, 91% of decided applications landed inside eight weeks, which sounds excellent until you notice that more than a quarter of that cohort never entered the calculation. The queue is invisible in precisely the statistic a council would quote.
I develop property, so here is the practical version. When you underwrite a site you are underwriting a council's staffing rota as much as a policy document. The published performance figures will not show you the rota, because the applications that would reveal it are the ones those figures leave out.
1.5 million homes is an ambition. 2,660 planners is the schedule.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
