Councils in England and Wales say they are short 2,660 planners. A year ago they said 2,200.
That is the headline finding of Planning on Empty, the Home Builders Federation and Paragon Bank research published on 1 September and built on Freedom of Information responses covering the 2025/26 financial year.
The number itself is less interesting than its direction. A shortfall that grows 20% in twelve months, during a period when the shortage was already well documented and money was being spent on it, is not a backlog being worked through. It is a gap opening faster than it is being closed.
What 80% of Capacity Actually Means
Ninety per cent of local planning authorities report being understaffed, and departments are running at roughly 80% of the headcount they say they need.
In absolute terms the average council employs fewer than 36 planning staff against a stated requirement of about 44. Eight people is not a rounding error in a department of that size, and the missing eight are not evenly distributed across the org chart.
Planning officers and senior planners account for almost half of all vacancies. Those are the grades that actually determine applications, negotiate with applicants and write the reports that go to committee. A department can be fully staffed in support and policy roles and still be unable to move a decision, because the constraint sits precisely where the decisions are made.
Turnover of 11% compounds it. Every departure takes site knowledge and local plan familiarity with it, and the replacement, if one is found, spends months rebuilding both.
The Commitment Covers Roughly Half the Gap
The government has committed to recruiting 1,400 additional planners over this parliament, alongside almost £100m of investment in planning capacity since 2024.
Set against 2,660, that is a little over half. It is also a substantial improvement on the previous position: the earlier edition of the same research, when the shortfall stood at 2,200, was published against a commitment of 300 additional junior planning officers, which covered under 15% of the gap. The direction of policy is right. The arithmetic still does not close.
There is also a timing problem that money does not solve. A planner is not a commodity hire. The pipeline runs through accredited courses and years of supervised practice, and the same research series has previously noted that a quarter of local authority planners left the public sector between 2013 and 2020. Recruiting 1,400 people into a profession that has been losing them for a decade is a longer project than a spending commitment implies.
Neil Jefferson, chief executive of the Home Builders Federation, put the dependency plainly: “Planning reform will only succeed if local planning authorities have the staff and resources to deliver it.”
One in Five Major Applications Meets Its Legal Deadline
The statutory target for determining a major planning application is 13 weeks. Around one in five are decided inside it.
It is worth being precise about what that means, because “target” undersells it. The 13 weeks is set in legislation, not aspiration. A regime in which the legal timescale is met in roughly 20% of cases has effectively stopped functioning as a deadline and become a formality that both sides plan around.
For an applicant the practical consequence is that the statutory period tells you almost nothing about when you will get an answer. That is a planning assumption, a financing assumption and a build-programme assumption all at once, and none of them can be anchored to the number in the statute.
Simon Creer, director of communications at the Royal Town Planning Institute, described planning teams as “under-staffed, under-resourced, and increasingly, under pressure to deliver”. The three are related: the pressure to hit the timescale falls on the same people who are too few to hit it.
515 Days to Sign a Section 106 Agreement
The most striking figure in the research is not about determination at all. Section 106 agreements take an average of 515 days to complete.
These are the legal agreements that attach obligations to a permission: affordable housing, contributions to schools and roads, open space. They are negotiated after the planning judgement is essentially made, and they are pure legal and administrative throughput.
Almost seventeen months is a long time for a document that both parties want signed. It is also the part of the process least visible in the headline statistics, because a permission is not counted as granted until the agreement completes, so delay here is invisible to anyone reading determination rates alone.
The commercial effect is direct. Land is held, interest accrues, and the professional team stays on the clock. Neal Moy, managing director of Paragon Development Finance, said the lender “sees first-hand the consequences of understaffed planning teams, with many of our customers experiencing prolonged delays”. A development finance business is a good place to observe this, because delay converts into interest cost on a facility that is already drawn.
Agency Staff Fill the Hole at a Premium
Over half of responding councils use agency workers to cover the shortfall.
That is a rational short-term response to a vacancy that cannot be filled permanently, and it is also expensive. The earlier edition of this research measured average agency spending of about £200,000 per council in a single year, and observed that the total across England and Wales would have funded a substantial number of permanent graduate planners instead.
The trap is structural rather than a failure of judgement. A council cannot leave applications undetermined while it recruits, so it buys cover; the cover costs more than the salary it substitutes for; the higher cost makes the permanent recruitment harder to fund. Authorities running short of money find that the cheapest option in any given month is the most expensive one over a year.
It also does nothing for the continuity problem. An agency planner covering a caseload for a few months cannot accumulate the local knowledge that makes a determination quick, which is part of why buying capacity does not restore throughput at the same rate as having it.
What This Costs Everyone Downstream
Planning delay does not stay in the planning department.
It shows up first in the order book. New construction orders fell by £1.2bn in a quarter, and while planning is only one input into that, a consent that arrives eighteen months late is an order that is not placed this year. The sector’s output data reflects the same pressure, with the construction PMI improving while remaining firmly in contraction.
It reaches smaller builders hardest. A large housebuilder can carry a diversified land bank and absorb a stalled site; a firm building fifteen homes a year cannot, because one delayed permission is most of its pipeline. The result is a system that quietly favours scale, which is the opposite of what a competitive housebuilding market needs.
And it reaches the councils themselves. Section 106 money that has not completed is money not spent on the schools and roads the development is supposed to fund, which is one reason unspent developer contributions have accumulated at the same time as the resource shortage.
The Target That Rests on These 2,660 People
All of this sits underneath a stated ambition of 1.5 million new homes.
Whatever view one takes of that number, it cannot be delivered by a system determining a fifth of its major applications on time and taking seventeen months to sign the accompanying legal agreement. Reform of policy does not change throughput if the constraint is the number of qualified people available to process the work, and every reform that adds a consultation stage, a new plan-making duty or a fresh assessment adds to the same queue.
The useful thing about this research is that it makes the constraint countable. It is not an abstraction about bureaucracy or a complaint about process. It is 2,660 people, in identifiable grades, in departments that have said in writing how many they need and how many they have.
For anyone whose business depends on a consent, the planning assumption to make is the measured one rather than the statutory one. Budget the 13 weeks as a floor rather than an expectation, treat the Section 106 stage as a distinct project with its own timeline, and price the finance accordingly. That is not a counsel of despair; it is simply what the numbers say, and a plan built on the statute rather than the evidence will be wrong in the same direction every time.
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