Out for Delivery

Alongside the adopted version of the National Planning Policy Framework, yesterday the government released the long-awaited Housing Delivery Test scores for 2024 and 2025. This quantifies the number of homes delivered (that’s built, not just granted planning permission) in the last three years for each planning authority in England; and measures it against the housing target assigned to each calculated by what’s called the “standard method”.

I’ve consolidated both the score and the consequence for each authority onto two maps, below, which shows the high-level performance across the country. There are a couple of caveats: because of historic merging of planning authorities, the data shows Somerset Unitary Authority and Cumberland UA divided into their historic districts. I’ve simply merged the figures to reveal a new score and consequence. Also omitted are development corporations, such as Old Oak and Park Royal (OPDC).

As you’d expect from previous years (given that we’ve not built an awful lot since the last time these results were released in December 2024), this shows the poorest performance clustered around the major cities, with London and the south east faring particularly badly, despite a few bright spots: Barnet, Harrow, Westminster, Wandsworth and Croydon all avoid any consequences at all, with scores exceeding 95%. Barnet scrapes through with 97%, the remaining three all comfortably above the 100% threshold.

Apart from City of London – which is always anomalous and achieved a score of 4% (building just 14 homes in three years against a target of 416) – the worst performing authority was Castle Point in Essex, with a score of just 11%. Portsmouth was also at 11%, with 308 homes of 2,702 delivered. Of all the London boroughs, Redbridge achieved the lowest score with 30%; Wandsworth the highest, with a heroic 123%.

Here’s the full breakdown, region by region for the whole of England.

The maps here are a useful snapshot of the national picture, but it’s difficult to identify some of the smaller authorities, so I’ve created an online web map which shows the data in far more detail. You can view this by clicking on the button below.