Why are local authorities struggling to reach a timely conclusion on appeals?

Increasingly, developers are advised to regard appeal as a route to planning permission. Traditionally, a planning appeal was a safeguard, not a default planning strategy – so what’s changed?

In our experience applicants are not necessarily eager to appeal. But where a policy compliant scheme moves slowly, Section 106 negotiations drift or members refuse against officer recommendation, appeals are becoming the preferred option.

Planning Inspectorate figures demonstrate a rise in appeal activity: Section 78 appeals received in January to March 2026 were 18.2% higher than in the same period in 2025, while the allowed rate for Section 78 appeals was 32% for April 2025 to March 2026.

The government has put in place reforms intended to make appeal less necessary: the revised NPPF, planning committee reform and the national scheme of delegation should make routine and technical decisions less dependent on committee cycles. New call-in arrangements require authorities to consult the secretary of state before refusing applications for 150 homes or more and the Section 106 roadmap also signals that delay and inflexibility are no longer tolerable.

These measures are about speed and certainty. They also carry the risk of creating the perception that as more decision making moves upwards, local voices appear to become more absent. Is this a genuine threat to local democracy, or more a question of appearance than the reality?

Any democratic concern should not be overstated. Appeals do not remove local input, because inspectors must still take account of the local development plan and responses to consultations on a planning application made by members of the public or consultees. In non-determination cases, councils can still take an application to committee to determine what their view would have been or respond to changes in circumstances.

The appeal route is not a democratic void but part of the planning system that Parliament has created. It can test whether local objections are planning objections, whether a refusal is robust and whether delay has become unreasonable.

Another way of looking at this is how towns and communities are impacted when policy compliant development is delayed. With housing delivery facing acute pressure and the government’s housing targets looking increasingly challenging, there needs to be a mechanism whereby a timely decision can be made.

That said, what is lost is the visible, public part of local planning: the debate in the room, the local explanation and the sense that a decision has been argued through in the place affected by it.

Committees can be political and inconsistent, but they can also provide a valuable forum in which local trade-offs are made in public. If residents believe that committee is only a staging post before the real decision is made by an inspector or minister, trust may suffer.

For this reason, appeal should not become the default answer to delay. Instead, for developers it should remain a strategic decision with risk attached. For councils, every avoidable appeal is a sign that the local process has not worked as it should. For government, a faster appeal system may help delivery in the short term, but it cannot substitute for well-resourced planning departments, up-to-date local plans and committees that are trained and willing to make difficult decisions.

The appeal system will remain necessary and important for as long as demand for new homes exceeds the capacity of local authorities to determine applications efficiently. The aim should not be to weaken appeal rights but to restore confidence in first instance decision making, so that appeal returns to its proper role as a safeguard for difficult cases, rather than the route by which too many acceptable schemes finally secure consent.

Andy Cowan is an associate partner at Carter Jonas (Manchester)