IN Brief:
- Nine in ten responding local planning authorities are below full staffing capacity, with departments operating at an average of 80% of required staffing.
- The estimated staffing gap has increased from 2,200 to 2,660 planners in a year, while average staff turnover stands at 11%.
- The shortage coincides with a revised NPPF and a growing workload covering biodiversity, infrastructure, building safety, and local-plan preparation.
The Home Builders Federation has identified a widening staffing deficit across local planning authorities in England and Wales, with councils operating at an average of 80% of the staffing levels they say are required to run their planning departments at full capacity.
Its 2026 Planning on Empty research, backed by Paragon Development Finance, found that 90% of responding authorities were below full staffing capacity during the 2025/26 financial year. The average planning department employed just under 36 staff against a stated full-capacity requirement of 44, while 44% of respondents were operating at 80% of full strength or below.
The national shortfall is estimated at 2,660 planners, up 20% from 2,200 in the previous year’s exercise. Planning officers account for 28% of current vacancies, team leaders and principal planners for 21%, and technical and administrative roles for a further 20%.
Recruitment figures suggest the shortage is not simply a collection of temporarily vacant posts. One third of authorities surveyed had no vacancies advertised, while 45% had fewer active vacancies than would be required to reach their own assessment of full capacity.
Average turnover across planning departments stood at 11%, with 30% of councils recording turnover of at least 15% during the year. Although average planning-team headcount increased slightly during 2025/26, HBF’s data indicates that recruitment has not kept pace with the wider staffing requirement.
Agency labour remains part of the response. Some 55% of surveyed councils used agency workers for planning services, while average spending across all respondents, including authorities that used none, was almost £200,000 per council. Charnwood Borough Council spent more than £1.7m and North Hertfordshire Council £1.2m during the year.
The capacity gap is visible in application performance. HBF says only around 20% of major applications for developments of 10 homes or more are determined within the statutory 13-week period, while separate federation research puts the average time required to complete Section 106 agreements at 515 days.
Local authorities are also holding about £9bn in unspent Section 106 contributions, with staffing and resource constraints among the reasons councils have given for difficulties monitoring, allocating, and deploying the money. The same planning departments are expected to process applications, negotiate obligations, discharge conditions, prepare local plans, and absorb a growing range of technical and regulatory duties.
That workload now sits alongside a substantially revised National Planning Policy Framework. The new NPPF took effect on 17 August and separates national decision-making policies more clearly from plan-making requirements, while introducing a broader package of reforms intended to make planning decisions faster and more consistent.
Authorities are simultaneously dealing with Biodiversity Net Gain, nutrient neutrality, flood risk, building-safety requirements, and an accelerated timetable for local-plan preparation. HBF argues that these additional responsibilities are increasing the technical and administrative burden on departments whose existing staffing levels are already below their stated requirement.
The government has committed to recruiting 1,400 additional planners during this Parliament and has invested almost £100m in planning capacity since 2024. HBF’s estimate of the current shortfall is substantially larger, even before future staff turnover and changes in workload are taken into account.
For construction programmes, planning capacity affects more than the date on which a committee or officer issues a decision. Validation, consultation responses, legal agreements, reserved matters, technical conditions, and discharge work can all influence when design teams and contractors have enough certainty to commit expenditure and mobilise.
A scheme that spends additional months in those stages continues to absorb professional fees and finance while construction revenue remains deferred. Material prices, labour costs, funding conditions, and viability assumptions can also move during the delay, leaving an application commercially different by the time outstanding planning matters are resolved.
The pressure is particularly acute against an already weak housing pipeline. Recent HBF data on housing permissions showed only 408 larger sites securing approval in the first quarter of 2026, the lowest quarterly figure in the federation’s dataset.
Fewer sites entering the consented pipeline and longer administrative periods after submission compound one another. A national total of approved homes can also conceal the effect on regional contractors and suppliers when a small number of large strategic schemes account for a disproportionate share of permissions.
The revised NPPF is intended to simplify parts of that system, but implementation still depends on people within local authorities applying the policies, assessing evidence, negotiating obligations, and processing decisions. National rules can alter the planning framework quickly; rebuilding experienced planning teams is a slower exercise.
HBF is calling for sustained long-term funding for permanent planning staff, annual monitoring of local-authority planning capacity, and explicit assessment of the staffing consequences whenever new regulation or policy is introduced. Those proposals focus attention on administrative capacity as well as the wording of planning policy itself.
The next indication will come from determination times, legal agreements, and the number of sites moving from permission into construction. If staffing remains around one fifth below the levels councils say they need, an increasingly ambitious planning system will still be relying on departments with fewer people than the workload requires.
