Published quarterly
There is no guarantee. There is a number.
A money-back promise on a refused application is easy to write and tells you nothing about whether the work is any good. So instead we publish our own grant rate against the national benchmark, and we publish it whether or not it flatters us.
The figure
Not yet publishable
We have 1 decided cases in the last twelve months. The threshold for publishing a percentage is 20, and we are not going to move it because the number underneath happens to look good.
Below that sample a percentage is noise wearing a decimal point. Every competitor headline you have read that quotes a success rate without a denominator is doing exactly this and not telling you.
The national benchmark is 87%, from MHCLG Live Table P120A (England, rolling 12-month). That is the number to judge anyone against, including us, once we have enough cases to have one.
By type
Broken down
A breakdown is computed for every application type and published only above 20 decided cases. The ones below it are shown as withheld rather than removed, so you can see they exist.
| Type | Decided | Granted | Won |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minor | 1 | Withheld | Withheld |
Method
How it is calculated
In full, because a published figure with a hidden method is a marketing claim.
Grant rate is the number of cases granted divided by the number of cases decided, over a rolling twelve months, on the date the council issued its decision.
Win rate is the same, plus allowed appeals and split decisions where our side prevailed. It is reported separately rather than folded into the headline, because a split decision is not an unqualified grant and rolling it in would flatter the number.
Withdrawn applications count as decided. They are in the denominator and not in the numerator. An application withdrawn because it was going to fail is a failure, and excluding those is the most common way this kind of figure is quietly inflated.
The window is twelve months. Not since launch, and not a best quarter.
The benchmark is 87%, from MHCLG Live Table P120A (England, rolling 12-month). It is the government’s own published figure for England, and it is deliberately a hard benchmark: most planning applications in this country are granted, so beating it is the only result that means anything.
Check it
Every case behind this number is on a public planning register. You do not have to take our word for any of it, which is the only reason publishing it is worth anything.
Councils publish every application they receive and every decision they issue. Anyone who wants to audit this figure can, and we would rather be checked than believed.
A grant rate is also not the whole story, and we would rather say so than let it do more work than it can carry. A firm that only takes easy applications will beat one that takes hard ones. What the number does prove is that the work is real, the outcomes are real, and we are willing to be measured on them.
Start here
See how your own council performs.
The same kind of figure, for every planning authority in the country: how often they grant, how long they take, and how much of that is inside the statutory period.