councils currently have at least 100 resolved decisions in the latest 90-day check. The rest need caveats before any approval-rate comparison is shown.
The tempting version of this page was a league table: hardest councils, most lenient councils, approval percentage by authority. That is not good enough for a live planning-data product. In the latest 90-day quality check, only 58 of 375 councils had 100 or more approved/refused decisions, and 192 councils had fewer than 30. For those smaller samples, a single refusal can swing the apparent rate by several percentage points.
Why the sample matters
Approval rate is calculated over resolved outcomes only: approved plus refused decisions. Withdrawals and undetermined applications are shown separately because they mean something different. That makes the denominator cleaner, but it also makes the sample smaller. A council with 18 resolved decisions in 90 days should not sit next to a council with 1,800 and be read as equally certain.
| Recent resolved decisions | How PlanWire treats the approval rate |
|---|---|
| 100+ | Publishable with sample size and capture context |
| 30-99 | Directional only; not ranked as a council comparison |
| 0-29 | Suppressed as insufficient recent evidence |
What we publish instead
PlanWire now returns an approval percentage only when the council has at least 100 approved/refused decisions in the measurement window. Below that floor, the API exposes the raw counts and marks the rate as not publishable. That lets customers see why a council is missing from a benchmark instead of mistaking a blank value for an error.
We also keep decision-capture context beside the rate. A high-volume council can still be a poor benchmark if its portal exposes approvals and refusals unevenly, while a small council can be fully captured but too quiet to rank over a short window. Both are real facts; neither should be flattened into a single league-table number.
For developers and investors, a council approval rate is useful only when the sample is strong enough to trust. Otherwise the right answer is "insufficient recent decisions", not a fake-precise percentage.
Why this is hard to see — and why it matters
Refusal data is genuinely difficult to capture cleanly: every UK council publishes decisions on its own portal and words "refused" dozens of different ways. Most planning tools surface approvals and quietly miss refusals. That is why the refusal signal is valuable, and also why it needs guardrails. See our guide on what refusal data tells property investors.
Methodology: PlanWire classifies decision outcomes from each council's published decision records. Approval-rate percentages are calculated only over approved and refused outcomes, excluding withdrawals and undetermined applications. Rates below the minimum sample threshold are suppressed rather than ranked.