Open today, shut at determination. Or the reverse.
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. And the one that governs is the one applying when your application is determined — not the one published today.
- Projected supply, in years
- Requirement, buffer and shortfall
- Supply at each forward base date
- The next two delivery measurements
- What each unmeasured year must deliver
- Successive trajectories, compared
- Consent stage, site by site
- Permissioned share, year by year
- Conversion by consent stage
- Resolution to decision notice
- Lead-in and build-out
- Supply attributable to no site
- The schedule re-timed on the consenting chain
- Distribution by settlement tier
- Growth against identified capacity
- Small and medium site targets
- 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
- House price to earnings
- Homelessness cost and incidence
- Wholly affordable consents
Half are tested against a statutory threshold; the rest against the authority's own evidence base.
“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. That is the whole of what this record does.
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.
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 evaluation runs 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.
One district, evaluated in full.
Rather than show a little of everywhere, here is the whole of one. Harborough District against all four questions, entirely on the Council's own published evidence — twenty-four measures, four parts, every figure sourced to the document it came from. It is what you would receive, and the same evaluation runs for any authority.
years of supply, on its own schedule
Computed by the Council itself, at 1 April 2026. No published trajectory it has issued reaches five years at any base date.
of projected supply holds no permission
5,146 dwellings the authority must make good site by site. Only 2.2% of dwellings at outline stage reach the five-year window.
delivered by the last plan's allocations
Against its own projection. Everything the plan did not allocate delivered 105.5% of what was asked of it.
of outline dwellings reach the window
Against every dwelling on a full permission landing inside it. Consent stage governs delivery, not allocation status.
of assessed affordable need met
997 dwellings against 2,634 across six years, and the annual figure has fallen in each of the last four.
published figures for one year
444, 670, 550 and 185, from four documents of the same authority, three sharing a data date. Only one can be carried.
The gate is open on supply. It is narrowing.
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.
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. No published trajectory it has issued reaches five years at any base date those documents support.
Schedule of 12.06.26And 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. The position that governs is the one applying when the application is determined, not the one published today.
Base dates to 01.04.28Delivery below 75% opens the gate on its own
Independently of supply. Harborough passes at 139% today with no consequence — but the denominator moves with the window, and on the Council's own published figures 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 2027Positions 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.
Written once, at the standard the hardest reader requires.
The record is prepared to the evidential standard of an appeal. That happens to serve three different readers well.
Landowners
Whether your district is under-supplied, whether it is projected to still be so when an application on your land would be determined, and what that means for holding it.
Planning agents and consultants
The supply position, the delivery record and the source document, cited and dated, ready to lift into a statement of case without re-deriving it.
Developers and land investors
A comparable read across districts on the measures that actually govern risk: supply, delivery, buffer, and plan-making stage.
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.