The planning rules changed in August. If your business owns land, this is the number to check.

Aerial view of residential development and open land affected by UK planning policies

Ninety-three English councils now sit below a threshold that changes how certain planning applications are judged. More than half of them are in London and the South East, and the change is narrower than the headlines suggest.

If your business owns land, is sitting on a site, has an expansion plan or has an application with a council right now, the rules it will be judged under changed on 17 August. In most cases nobody will have told you.

The new National Planning Policy Framework took effect that day, replacing the December 2024 version. Its national decision-making policies became material considerations immediately, which means they apply to applications and appeals already in the system, not only to plans being written for the future.

On the same day, the Government published the delayed 2025 Housing Delivery Test measurement. That exercise scores every council on how many homes it actually delivered against how many it was required to deliver. The two documents now talk to each other in a way they did not before.

The number that matters is 75%

Analysis of the full dataset by chartered town planners at national consultancy Planning By Design finds that, of the 301 local planning authorities with a numerical result, 93 scored below 75%. A further 54 fell below the 95% pass mark without dropping under 75%.

Under Policy S5 of the new framework, certain categories of development outside settlement boundaries should be approved unless the benefits would be substantially outweighed by adverse effects. The policy expressly treats a delivery score below 75% as evidence of unmet housing need for that purpose.

Under the old rules, a failing score was an argument applicants had to build, evidence and defend at appeal, case by case. The new policy changes the starting position for qualifying proposals. Not the outcome. The starting position.

Where the failing councils actually are

Region	Authorities	Below 75%	Share
London	34	22	65%
South East	64	30	47%
East of England	45	13	29%
South West	29	8	28%
West Midlands	30	8	27%
Yorkshire and The Humber	15	3	20%
North East	12	2	17%
East Midlands	35	4	11%
North West	37	3	8%

More than half of the 93, 52 in total, are in London or the South East. The North West, which has more local planning authorities than any region outside the South East, contributes three.

Collectively, those 93 councils delivered 167,600 homes against a requirement of 326,300 over the three years to March 2025, a shortfall of close to 159,000 homes. Nationally, England delivered 707,700 homes against 772,200 required, a delivery rate of 92%. The failure is concentrated, not general, and it is concentrated in the South.

Aaron Basi, Chartered Town Planner and Head of Planning at Planning By Design, said:

The instinctive reading of housing reform in this country is that it is aimed at the North. This data says the opposite. The councils that have crossed the threshold are overwhelmingly in the South East and London, which is where land is most expensive, most constrained and most fiercely defended.

The twist most people will miss

Basi added:

There is a further twist that I think will get missed. Policy S5 governs land outside settlements. In most of London there is barely any land outside a settlement, so for the majority of those 22 boroughs the S5 route is close to academic and Policy S4 is doing the real work. The region where this genuinely changes the arithmetic is the South East: 30 authorities, a great deal of countryside, a great deal of Green Belt, and a policy that now starts from should be approved rather than from no.

For a business reading the headline number, that is the part to check first. A borough appearing on the list does not mean anything has changed for a particular site.

What a failing score does not do

Planning By Design is warning that the change is narrower than it is likely to be reported.

A sub-75% score satisfies one limb of one category within Policy S5. Even where a proposal qualifies, the site still has to be physically well-related to an existing settlement, unless the nature of the development makes that requirement inappropriate, and of a scale that existing or proposed infrastructure can genuinely absorb. Design, highways, drainage, heritage, landscape and biodiversity all apply exactly as they did before.

Green Belt land also keeps its own distinct policy framework. The stronger general support for development elsewhere does not override it.

Basi said:

We have spent a year telling landowners that reform of the Green Belt is not the same thing as permission on their field. That is still true, and it is still the most expensive misunderstanding in this market. A failing delivery score is not planning permission. It is evidence that gets a proposal through one door. Everything on the other side of that door is unchanged.

Live applications are affected now

Annex A of the framework states that development plan policies which are materially inconsistent with the new national decision-making policies should be given very limited weight, unless they were examined and adopted against this framework. Age alone is not the test, but a materially more restrictive local policy may now carry considerably less weight than it did in July.

MHCLG figures show district-level authorities in England received 79,600 planning applications in the quarter to March 2026 and decided 68,400. A substantial number of those cases were still undetermined on 17 August, and are now being judged against a different rulebook to the one they were submitted under.

What to do now

Check whether the council deciding your application scored below 75% in the 2025 Housing Delivery Test. The figures are published by MHCLG.
If it did, check whether Policy S5 applies to the site at all. It governs land outside settlement boundaries, so for many urban sites it is irrelevant.
Review whether your submitted planning statement addresses the new framework. Most cases submitted before 17 August do not.
Do not treat a failing score as a shortcut. Design, highways, drainage, heritage, landscape and biodiversity are unchanged.
If the site is Green Belt, treat it as a separate question entirely.

Planning By Design has published a full breakdown of the 2025 Housing Delivery Test results, and what the new NPPF changes for planning applications, here.