Clear evidence for housing land decisions.
Understand the housing supply position today, and how it could change before your application is decided.
Outside settlements, policy S5(1)(j) admits development addressing an evidenced unmet need, and names two: whether the authority can demonstrate a five year supply, or scores below 75% in the Housing Delivery Test. Both are published figures. Both move. The one that governs is the one applying when your application is determined, not the one published today.
Written once, at the standard the hardest reader requires
- Composition of the published trajectory
- The site rows, cast against the printed totals
- Successive trajectories, compared
- The published position, and how old it is
- The next two delivery measurements
- Supply at each forward base date
- Yield by planning status
- The consenting period, observed
- The timing inputs, tested
- The consenting chain, stated
- Deliverability of the allocated element
- The consenting pipeline
- The outline element and reserved matters
- The trajectory, re-timed on the chain
- The register against the trajectory
- The supply position, reconciled
- Distribution by settlement tier
- Small and medium site targets
- Growth against identified capacity
- The previous plan, tested on outturn
- Site allocations, and the reach of policy S6
- Assessed need, and on which definition
- Delivery against assessed need
- Income required to buy and to rent
- Homelessness cost and incidence
- Wholly affordable consents
- The position in the Inspectorate's own decisions
- The five most recent decisions, read in full
The same twenty-eight, in the same order, for every district — so two can be read side by side.
“The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.”
The Economist · 6 May 2017 · Read the leader
In planning, that is only half true — and the half it gets wrong is the half that matters.
The data is not scarce. Every figure this work runs on is published free by the local planning authority itself: a deliverable-supply schedule, a monitoring report, a needs assessment, a site availability assessment, a planning register. Nobody is withholding anything. It is all sitting there, in PDFs, on council websites.
What is scarce is the reading. A supply schedule runs to hundreds of rows and states its conclusion in a single number, and that number decides applications. Whether it follows from the rows beneath it, whether the same authority said something different four months earlier, whether the sites counted hold consent — none of that is visible without someone taking it apart line by line.
The value was never in holding the data. It is in having done the work on it, and being able to show which document every figure came from when you are asked.
Every case turns on four questions.
Not our questions — the ones a decision-maker asks. The first opens the gateway at S5(1)(j) on the two the policy names; the fourth on the unmet need it does not — affordable housing, and self-build and custom housebuilding. Each is closed on the authority's own published evidence, and each is a question of dated fact rather than impression. And because the Inspectorate has usually been asked already, what its decisions record on each is read in full and carried alongside.
Is the gateway open — and will it still be?
Both S5(1)(j) triggers are forecastable from the authority's own published schedule. We compute the supply at every forward base date it supports, and what each unmeasured year must deliver to cross each delivery threshold.
Is that supply deliverable?
A site counted in the supply is not a site that will be built. What separates them is consent stage and elapsed time, and both are matters of record rather than judgement — so the register is read whole, and the schedule re-timed on the authority's own observed consenting periods.
Does the plan distribute soundly?
Where growth is placed, against the capacity the authority itself identified — and how the last plan's allocations actually performed when the same method was used on them.
Is there other evidenced unmet need?
S5(1)(j) names two, and is expressly not limited to them. Affordable housing need the authority has itself assessed qualifies, and so does self-build and custom housebuilding need on its statutory register — policy HO5(1)(c) treats both as an identified need, and neither depends on the supply position. The worked evaluations run the affordable limb in full: what has been assessed, what has been delivered against it, and what the gap costs. The self-build limb is run where the authority publishes its register and its determinations against it, and where an Inspector has recorded the authority conceding its statutory duty, that concession is carried — both worked districts have one on the record.
Two districts, evaluated in full.
Rather than show a little of everywhere, here is the whole of two. Harborough and Blaby against all four questions, entirely on each Council's own published evidence — the same twenty-eight measures, in the same order, every figure sourced to the document it came from. Read side by side, they answer the first question in opposite directions, and that is the point of the method.
| On the Council's own evidence | Harborough | Blaby |
|---|---|---|
| Five-year supply at 1 April 2026, as the Council prints it | 3.38 | 5.09 |
| The same schedule, re-timed on the Council's own register and consenting record | 3.13 | 4.58 |
| Housing Delivery Test, 2025 measurement | 139% | 86% · action plan |
| The 2027 measurement, on the Council's own committed figures | 80.7% | 53.5% |
| Median from committee resolution to decision notice, against 147 days assumed | 190 days | 197 days |
| Small and medium sites, against the 20% plan-making target | 3.2% | 10.1% |
| Take-up of the capacity the Council's own assessment identifies | 29.3% | 19.5% |
| Affordable delivery against assessed need, over the assessment period | 37.9% | 13.7% |
| Households in the gap between renting and buying | 18.1% | 12.9% |
| Wholly affordable consents in ten years, units counted once | 1 new, 1 converted · 110 units | 10 · 342 units |
| Reported gross homelessness expenditure, one year | +193% | +97% |
| The position the Inspectorate last recorded | 3.1 years | 2.78 years |
| Base date · register read | 13 Oct 2026 · 4 Sep 2026 | 1 Apr 2026 · 2 Sep 2026 |
Claret marks a figure that engages or tends towards S5(1)(j), or falls short of the benchmark the row is measured against. Each figure is the Council's own, or computed from its own published rows; the section it comes from is on the district page.
Two districts, and the gate opens in opposite directions.
S5(1)(j) opens on either trigger, and an application determined in 2028 is judged on the 2028 position, not this one. Every figure below is the Council's own, and each is moving.
Harborough · base date 13 October 2026
The supply trigger is engaged today
3.38 years at 1 April 2026, 1,283 dwellings short — and the Council computed it itself, on its own deliverable-sites schedule. Re-timed on its own register, 3.13. No published trajectory it has issued reaches five years at any base date those documents support.
Schedule of 12.06.26 · register of 04.09.26And it closes on that same schedule
3.38 at 1 April 2026, 4.17 at 2027, 4.77 at 2028 — an improvement of 1.39 years across three base dates, still short of five at every one as printed. Re-timed on the register, 2028 alone clears five, on a pending pipeline the Council has assessed nowhere.
Base dates to 01.04.28Delivery below 75% opens the gate on its own
Harborough passes at 139% today with no consequence — but the denominator moves with the window, and on the Council's own committed row the 2027 measurement returns 80.7%, and 41.6% on its deliverable-sites schedule as printed. Both are calculable now, from figures already published.
Next measurement 2027Blaby · base date 1 April 2026
The supply trigger is not engaged on the plan's face
5.09 years at 1 April 2026 on the trajectory published with the Regulation 19 plan — above five by 63.5 dwellings across the whole window, all of it on allocations without permission. The Council's own last published figure is 2.78, a year old; the last it agreed at inquiry, 2.451.
Trajectory of 30.06.26 · register of 02.09.26Re-timed on its own consenting record, it falls short
4.58 years when each allocation with a live application is run from the register's own dates and the Council's own observed periods — 290 dwellings short. 4.52 to 4.71 across every input tried; none reaches five at the base date that governs. 2027 and 2028 clear it.
Governing window 2026–31The second trigger opens next year on the Council's own trajectory
86% today, with an action plan. The 2026 measurement on the Council's own projected completions returns 70.6% and the 2027 measurement 53.5% — both below the 75% at which Annex D deems an evidenced unmet need to exist for S5(1)(j), whatever the supply figure says.
Next measurement 2026Positions move without notice. A figure on this site is accurate only as at its stated date and must be checked against the current statement before it is relied on.
The position in your district has already moved.
Tell us the authority and the site. We will tell you where its supply position stands, what it is projected to be when an application would be determined, and what the Framework published on 17 August 2026 changed — before you commit to anything.