The gap between what the planning system is being asked to do and what it is staffed to do got measurably wider this year.
The Home Builders Federation’s Planning on Empty report, published in August 2026 with Paragon Bank, is based on a Freedom of Information survey of councils across England and Wales covering the 2025/26 financial year. It asked a narrow, checkable question — how many planning staff do you have, and how many do you say you need — and the answers are worse than last year’s.
The numbers
90% of local planning authorities are operating below full staffing capacity. A year ago that figure was 80%.
The average department runs at 80% strength. The typical planning department in England and Wales has just under 36 staff. On its own assessment it needs 44.
Nearly half are worse than that. Of the councils below capacity, 44% are at 80% or less. In 2025 it was under a quarter.
The national shortfall is 2,660 planners — up 20% on last year’s 2,200. That works out at an average of 8.4 additional planners per authority. The government’s commitment is 1,400 additional planning officers across this Parliament, or roughly four per authority.
Recruitment isn’t closing it. A third of authorities have no vacancies advertised at all, and 45% have fewer active vacancies than they would need to reach full capacity — which the report reads, reasonably, as budget constraint rather than contentment. Planning officers account for 28% of vacancies and team leads or principal planners another 21%. Average turnover is 11%, and 30% of councils are at 15% or higher.
Agency staff are filling the gap expensively. 55% of responding councils use agency workers for planning services, at an average spend of nearly £200,000 per council across all respondents. Charnwood spent over £1.7 million; North Hertfordshire £1.2 million.
What it does to a programme
Two figures in the report do more work than the staffing numbers themselves.
Only around 20% of major applications — 10 or more units — are decided within the statutory 13 weeks. Not 20% late. 20% on time.
Section 106 agreements take an average of 515 days. That is HBF’s own earlier research, and it sits alongside £9 billion in Section 106 contributions currently held unspent by local authorities, partly because councils lack the staff to monitor and allocate them. We covered the government’s proposed standard s106 templates for 10–49 unit sites last week; this is the resourcing problem those templates are trying to route around.
The report is blunt about where the delay accumulates: “Delays to planning decisions, Section 106 negotiations and discharge of conditions are becoming entrenched across the development process.”
Why this lands on technical evidence in particular
The report identifies the thing that has changed underneath the staffing numbers: the job got bigger. It lists Biodiversity Net Gain, nutrient neutrality, flood risk and building safety as duties added at the planning stage in recent years, on top of the August 2026 NPPF, the Planning and Infrastructure Act, local government reorganisation and a new 30-month timetable for local plans.
Each of those arrives as a document someone in a planning department has to read and form a view on. When the department is at 80% strength and a fifth of its vacancies are for the senior officers who would normally handle the technical ones, the queue for that reading gets longer.
There is a specific consequence for anyone producing drainage, water efficiency, nutrient or energy evidence. The August 2026 Framework already moved a lot of that material forward — drainage evidence into the validation list under policy DM2, rather than into a condition to be discharged later. That change was designed to front-load evidence. In a fully staffed authority it front-loads scrutiny too. In an understaffed one, it front-loads the queue.
The result is that a weak or incomplete technical submission now costs more than it used to. A request for further information does not go to the back of a short queue. It goes to the back of a long one, staffed in part by agency officers who may not know the catchment, the local plan or the site.
Four things worth doing differently
Submit complete, not nearly complete. The single cheapest thing you can do in an understaffed system is not to generate a second round of correspondence. Check your submission against the authority’s own validation list, item by item, before it goes in — including the items you think are disproportionate. Arguing about a validation requirement costs weeks; supplying it costs an afternoon.
Make the technical documents readable by a generalist. The officer reading your infiltration testing or your water efficiency calculation may not be a drainage engineer or an energy assessor. State the method, state the standard you are working to, state the result, and put the workings in an appendix. A drainage strategy that answers the question in its first page gets determined faster than one that requires the reader to reconstruct it.
Assume conditions take longer to discharge than they used to. If your programme has a condition being discharged in six weeks because that is what the condition says, build in the real number. Discharge of conditions is named in the report as one of the places delay has become entrenched, and it is the stage with the least political visibility, so it is the stage that slips.
Do the evidence that can be done early, early. Infiltration testing depends on ground conditions and season. Nutrient budgets depend on credit availability. Water efficiency depends on which optional requirement applies. None of these get faster because you left them late, and all of them can stall a determination that is otherwise ready.
The wider point
The report’s recommendations are aimed at government: long-term funding for planning teams, a resourcing assessment attached to every new policy requirement, and annual public reporting of LPA capacity. Those are sensible and slow.
What is not slow is the adjustment applicants can make themselves. Planning reform has moved a great deal of evidence from the condition stage to the application stage. The authorities receiving that evidence are, on their own account, a fifth short of the staff they need to assess it. The practical response is to send them something that is easy to say yes to.
Get the drainage evidence right before it goes in
SoakMonkey runs a BRE Digest 365 soakaway calculation in your browser — the standard method, your own infiltration test data, and a clear result you can put in front of a planning officer or Building Control without further explanation.
If you have a scheme where the drainage, water efficiency or nutrient evidence needs to stand up at validation rather than at condition stage, get in touch and we’ll tell you what we’d want to see before it’s submitted.
Sources: Home Builders Federation — Planning on Empty, August 2026 · HBF — Planning staff shortages worsen despite Government reforms, further delaying housing delivery, 28 August 2026