Three quarters of large-scale planning decisions are being pushed back by councils and developers, The Financial Times reports.
These extensions are known as “performance agreements”, and their use means decisions are still counted as “on time” in official statistics.
Applications for large-scale housing wait two years on average for a decision, a report commissioned by the Land, Planning and Development Federation said.
This is a far cry from the 13-week target.
Josh Risso-Gill, partner at law firm Charles Russell Speechlys, said: “These performance stats highlight the deep resourcing challenges many local planning authorities face.
“Extensions of time have become a convenient workaround, masking the real strain in the system. Even with historically low application volumes and recent government funding, councils are still struggling to process increasingly complex applications.
“If the additional resources are deployed effectively, there is a real opportunity to make material improvement, but right now the system is still running on stopgaps rather than sustainable solutions.”
Performative agreements were intended to allow authorities more time to assess more complex developments, but their use has soared since 2015, when they were allowed to count towards timeline targets.