Questions about housing and planning, tested against the record.
These are working questions rather than positions. Some have stronger answers than others, and the answers that exist are below.
Transport is Croydon’s most-cited refusal category, at 28.3% of its coded reasons against a London average of 14.8%. It is the first-listed reason in 31 of 483 refusals. Design is the leading primary ground.
A published finding that pre-application advice helps in some boroughs and hurts in others turned out to be measuring the way the data was collected. The retraction, the artefact, and what would answer the question properly.
London’s ten most permissive small-sites boroughs reach the same outcome by four different routes. One of them, a plan that says yes in writing, is available to any borough that wants it.
London’s ten most restrictive small-sites boroughs do not restrict for one reason. Six can name a policy that accounts for it; four cannot, and one restricts against its own adopted plan.
In the crowded middle of the table a near-zero differential is the least informative number on the page. The same headline can hide a twenty-point split between one typology and another.
London’s ten cheapest boroughs sit inside a £107,000 band and still span forty points of small-sites outcome. Affordability is not the mechanism.
Nine of London’s ten most expensive boroughs approve small sites above expectation. The tenth, Barnet, restricts on a written plan, and it accounts for most of the price gradient.
A typology of the 4,267 applicants behind London’s small-sites applications, and a test of whether experience of the system pays. Filing repeatedly is not associated with a higher approval rate. Descriptive, not causal.
Across 11,689 decided applications in 32 boroughs, the gap between the most permissive and most restrictive authority runs to 43.6 percentage points once caseload mix is held constant, and it tracks house prices. Descriptive, not causal.
Harrow adopted a new local plan in March 2026. For schemes of one to nine homes the change that matters is the one that did not happen. The tenure arithmetic above ten units is meaningfully different.
From 1 July 2026 the NPPF paragraph 78c twenty per cent five-year housing land supply buffer applies to seven London boroughs, with the refusal record for each.
AMR21 formally records failure against the approvals, completions and affordable supply KPIs. The same document moved the Intermediate Rent eligibility ceiling from £67,000 to £75,000.
The fund covers site investigations, due diligence, feasibility and legal surveys. It does not cover application drafting. The five planning questions an applicant team has to answer first.
Two regulatory dates fall inside the next eight months, and between them they pin twelve London boroughs. The second has had less coverage and probably matters more.
Camden’s affordable housing threshold is one unit. Bromley’s is eleven. The same scheme meets an eleven-fold difference in threshold depending on which side of a boundary it sits.
Of the coded refusal reasons across 33 boroughs, 61.4% cite design, amenity, space standards, daylight or transport: the categories a small-site design code can speak to.
Space standards appear in more Newham refusal notices than any other category. In a borough that refuses 61.8% of decided small-site applications, undersized units are the most common way to fail.
Brent’s 47% approval rate sits on top of a second pattern. Approved schemes lose an average of 1.2 units between application and consent, so the delivered yield is lower than the headline.
At 70.5% Havering has the highest small-site refusal rate in London. Site type, density expectation and policy context all carry part of it.
Across 5,391 decided conversion applications the London-wide approval rate is 52.5%. Among boroughs with at least 30 decided conversions the range runs from 20.0% to 92.4%.
The assumption that conservation area status lowers approval rates is widespread. Across 33 boroughs the picture is more complicated, and in some places the direction reverses.
Inner London refuses 36.5% of decided small-site applications against 49.9% in outer London. The gap is not where it is usually assumed to be.
Approved applications in Hammersmith & Fulham take substantially longer to determine than refusals. The asymmetry points to negotiation rather than delay, and it has viability consequences.
Planning outcomes follow patterns that only become visible at scale. A note on what structured decision data changes, and what it does not.