Appeal timescales - the good, the bad and the ugly

The Planning Inspectorate’s latest statistical release on 22nd July shows a mix of good, bad and ugly news on the fraught issue of the likely timescale for a Decision on your appeal. As in the Clint Eastwood film 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly', it's a nail-biting, tension-filled period of waiting.....and waiting....and waiting.

The bad news – hearings and inquiry appeals

The bad news is that timescales for planning appeal hearings and inquiries remain long, with median timescales for s78 appeals in June 2021 of 43 weeks for hearings and 36 weeks for inquiries. 

For enforcement appeals the timescales are even longer, with median timescales of 62 weeks for hearings and 108 weeks for inquiries.  Enforcement cases comprise a relatively small proportion of all appeals, so these timescales increase the overall figures for all planning appeals only slightly, to an overall median of 44 weeks for hearings and 37 weeks for inquiries.

The good news – written reps appeals

The good news is that timescales are getting shorter for written reps.  As these comprise 95% of all decisions, this is positive news for the majority of appellants.

The median time for all written reps from ‘valid’ to decision was 20 weeks in June 2021.  This is an improvement on this time last year when it was 22 weeks.

Broken down by type of appeal, householder appeals had shorter median timescales at 17 weeks, whereas s78 appeals were 22 weeks and enforcement appeals were 29 weeks.

The ugly caveat

The ugly caveat is that there is high variability in the timescales for all appeals, and some can take considerably longer than the median (the ‘middle’ case if all cases were sorted from quickest to shortest). 

The standard deviation measures the spread of the data, with 68% of data points within one standard deviation of the mea.  Standard deviations for written reps appeals are 14 weeks, while for hearings it is 22 weeks and for inquiries it is 43 weeks.  The longer timescales for some appeals increases the numerical mean.  For example, for s78 planning appeals by the written reps procedure the median timescale in June was 21.9 weeks but a number of appeals took significantly longer than this and pulled the mean up to 25.2 weeks.

The good, the bad and the ugly

So next time you holster your appeal gun, remember it could be a long, hard wait until your Inspector pulls out his decision.

Source of statistics: The Planning Inspectorate Offical Statistics 22 July 2021: particularly Annexes B & C - detailed information on timeliness (June).

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