Planning performance statistics 2019/2020: quarterly (October to March)

Applications for Local Developments (excludes legacy cases)

This report presents summary statistics on planning application decision-making timescales for October 2019 to March 2020 (Quarters 3 and 4), as well as historic data going back to quarter one of 2015/16. It is based on data collected by the Scottish Government from Local and Planning Authorities as part of the Planning Performance Framework (introduced in 2012).

There were 12,714 decisions on local developments in the final six months of 2019/20, 224 fewer than the same period in the previous year. The average decision time for the 11,714 of these which were not subject to processing agreements was 9.2 weeks, slightly slower than the corresponding time of 9.1 weeks for the final six months of 2018/19.

In quarter three of 2019/20 there were 497 local development applications with processing agreements, 77.7% (386) met agreed timescales that had been set between developers and local authorities. In quarter four there were 503, 80.5% (405) meeting the agreed timescales.