Savills planning team reports that the heightened level of activity continued into Q4 2025, although no comprehensive data is available yet. However, the recent increase has not been enough to fully reverse the longer term decline in activity. Application volumes remain almost a third below the pre-pandemic 2017-19 norm, suggesting there is little chance of the land market seeing an oversupply of consented land over the next two to three years. Provisional planning consents data for the full year of 2025 also supports this conclusion, with the number of new homes receiving planning consent falling below 200,000.
The road to new home delivery
The recent flurry of application activity will also take some time to progress through the planning system. Despite a positive upward movement in applications, we anticipate a delay before the plots materialise into consents, and a selection of those applications submitted are unlikely to ever reach full permission stage. Past trends show that 8% of all lead applications submitted in England over the past decade were refused or withdrawn. With the current planning environment viewed by some as a time-limited opportunity, there may be more speculative applications submitted, which will increase the proportion of applications failing to reach permission stage.
For those applications that do succeed, decision times have increased over the past decade. Evidence from MHCLG shows that, excluding those using performance agreements, just 19% of major applications in England were determined within the statutory timeframe of 13 weeks in 2024, down from 47% in 2014. Savills analysis of live applications and recently determined consents in the planning pipeline shows an average determination period of 14 months, increasing to over two years for sites with over 500 homes.
In the absence of significant additional resource for local planning authorities, it is likely that decision timescales will become longer as more applications are submitted. This will further slow the rate at which any increase in consented land will come to market.
Limitation by location
The overall growth in the planning pipeline disguises regional and local variation in activity, which will have important consequences for both planning opportunities and land market dynamics. In some local authorities, fewer applications have been submitted than consents granted over the past few years, and others have seen fewer consents granted than new homes completed. In each instance, these areas have seen their future pipeline shrink, limiting capacity for housebuilding activity, and creating a land market that is more at risk of under than over supply.
In 158 (54%) local authorities, new homes have been built out at a faster rate than new consents have been granted, meaning these areas are likely to be facing a shortage of consented land. A further 4% of local authorities have granted consent for only 100 more homes than have been completed in the last three years, risking falling delivery if any of the consented land doesn’t come forward. This imbalance has been most evident across the North of England, where affordability headroom for consumers has helped accelerate new home delivery rates. The issue has also persisted in the East of England, where water availability, nutrient neutrality and grid capacity have limited the volume of consents granted.
Similarly, despite the rise in planning activity over the last year, applications over the last three years are lower than the number of consents granted in 112 (38%) local authorities, pointing to a further contraction in the development pipeline. 86 local authorities have seen declines in both planning consents and applications. In these markets, competition to secure consented land is likely to remain high over the next two to three years given the ongoing limited supply.
