Backing data and code: England planning activity, national trends and regional differences, Q1 2026

England planning activity: national trends and regional differences, Q1 2026. Backing data and reproducible calculations for Construction Capital study B001-R14, published as a public Google Slides presentation. Author: Matt Lenzie, Construction Capital.

The package analyses official MHCLG district planning statistics for England, released 19 June 2026. It includes a national quarterly series from Q1 2023 to Q1 2026, a Q1 2025/Q1 2026 comparison covering 310 authority IDs per quarter, nine English regions and a separately reported National Parks group.

England received 79,567 applications in Q1 2026, down 10.2% year on year. There were 68,371 decisions, 59,398 grants and 6,705 residential application grants. Applications are not dwelling counts, unique sites, starts or completions. Grant rates use decisions as their denominator; receipts and decisions are different cohorts. MHCLG imputes some non-responses and revises previous data: complete numeric coverage does not mean a 100% survey response.

Twelve files: original PS1 and PS2 source CSVs; national quarterly, authority comparison, authority decisions and regional CSVs; analysis-results.json; reproduce.py; source-manifest.json with source URLs and SHA-256 checksums; data-dictionary.txt; README.txt; and methodology-notes.txt. Calculated closing stock and timing definitions are documented explicitly. Python and pandas reproduce the derived tables from the archived source files.

Context within the research portfolio: compare planning activity with regional house-price benchmarks on OSF, property-type price differences on Zenodo, England housing sales on Kaggle, and national charge activity and lender concentration on Figshare. Observation periods and definitions differ. These are related works by the same author, not independent validation.

See Construction Capital market reports for the wider research programme and the development finance guide for scheme-appraisal context. Construction Capital arranges property finance and has a commercial interest in these markets. The study is descriptive and has not undergone independent peer review. OpenAI Codex assisted with source retrieval, code, drafting and presentation.

Primary sources: MHCLG planning live tables and Q1 2026 technical notes. Original public-sector data retain OGL v3.0 terms and Crown copyright; Construction Capital analysis and code are CC BY 4.0.

Presentation-location reference updated 9 September 2026. This record provides the backing data for B001-R14; the presentation and dataset are parts of the same study.