Worked district · evaluated to 12 August 2026

Harborough District, question by question.

One district, evaluated in full against the four questions, entirely on the Council's own published evidence. Twenty-four measures, four parts, every figure sourced to the document it came from. This is the deliverable — and the same evaluation can be run for any authority.

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What follows is the summary. The full analysis runs to twenty-six pages with every source cited, and is sent on request.

The conclusion, in four figures §01 · summary

3.38

years of supply at 1 April 2026 — and 4.77 at 2028, still short

63.8%

of its projected supply carries no planning permission

37.8%

delivered by the last plan's allocations against its own projection

37.9%

of assessed affordable need met across six years

Question one

Is the gateway open, and will it still be?

3.38 years at 1 April 2026, on the Council's own deliverable-supply schedule and its own arithmetic — 1,283 dwellings short.

The Council computes this figure itself. No modelling, discount or deliverability judgement is applied to reach it. And no published trajectory it has issued reaches five years at any base date those documents support.

3.11Years the Council's own October 2025 statement conceded — 2,401 dwellings against a requirement of 3,860

2.80–4.77The range across four base dates its schedule supports. None reaches five

2.96Years at a 20% buffer, the position that follows any measurement below 85%

1,517Dwellings 2032–33 must deliver at a 20% buffer for the 2028 window to reach five years — more than the District has recorded in any year

4Published figures for a single year — 444, 670, 550 and 185, three of them sharing a data date

80.7%The 2027 delivery measurement on the Council's own committed row — below 85%

25 mthsSpan across which those four irreconcilable trajectories were all published

951Dwellings needed in the only year still open to that window, against 769 projected — 23.6% more in a single year

And this is the part that decides a case rather than describes one. The gateway is not open or shut in the abstract — it is open or shut on the day the application is determined. On the Council's own schedule the supply trigger narrows year by year, while the delivery trigger moves the other way.

Both S5(1)(j) triggers, projected from the authority's own published figures
Base date	Supply, 5% buffer	Supply, 20% buffer	Gateway on supply
1 April 2026	3.38	2.96	Open
1 April 2027	4.17	3.65	Open
1 April 2028	4.77	4.17	Open, narrowly

Open — below five years, S5(1)(j) engaged on supply Shut — five years demonstrated

The supply figure improves by 1.39 years across three base dates and still never reaches five on any of them. The delivery trigger runs the other way: the 2025 measurement is 139% and carries no consequence, but on the Council's own committed row the 2027 measurement returns 80.7% — a 20% buffer — and on its deliverable-sites schedule as printed, 41.6%, below the 75% at which S5(1)(j) opens on delivery alone.

Stated against our own case The Council passes the Housing Delivery Test at 139%, published 17 August 2026, and no action plan is required. Recorded delivery across the five monitored years exceeds every unbuffered requirement figure considered. Neither 2026 nor 2027 is projected here as an outturn: the table states thresholds, and no consequence follows until a measurement is published. And on one construction the analysis puts in itself — the Council's schedule re-timed on the consenting chain, with the pending applications it omits added back — the 1 April 2028 position reaches 5.25 years. It is set out in full, with the answer: the limb carrying it is 1,078 dwellings of pending applications the Council has assessed for deliverability nowhere and left out of the schedule it published, and without that limb the same construction gives 3.89 years.

Question two

Is that supply deliverable?

63.8% of projected supply from 2026–27 carries no planning permission — 5,146 dwellings the Council must make good site by site.

Consent stage governs delivery far more reliably than allocation status. Tracing every scheme in the district's pipeline through to its stage shows where the risk actually sits, and it is not where the schedule assumes.

2.2%Of dwellings at outline stage land inside the five-year window. Every dwelling on a full permission does

93.1%Of the pipeline stands at outline — 4,851 of 5,213 dwellings, all requiring reserved matters

83.8 → 15.7Percentage of each year carrying permission, from 2026–27 to 2030–31

253 → 265Days from committee resolution adopted at the base date, on two schemes then still running. One has since completed at 265 — twelve days beyond it

2,850Dwellings on schemes of 250 and above delivering nothing at all in the window

29.5%Of allocated provision absent from the deliverable schedule entirely — including the plan's largest site

Stated against our own case The schedule's own exclusion note means its near-term columns understate the supply. The case is therefore put at its lowest on the one window the schedule was drawn to state completely, where it still falls short.

Question three

Does the plan distribute soundly?

37.8% of what the last adopted plan projected from its own allocations was actually delivered. Everything it did not allocate delivered 105.5%.

An allocation-led trajectory from this authority, on this method, has been tested once already. Its two strategic development areas — two-thirds of the allocated provision — have delivered nothing at all.

3.2%Compliance against the 20% combined small-and-medium-sites target now in national plan-making policy

29.3%Take-up of the capacity the Council's own SHELAA identifies, across twenty-nine settlements

9,573Dwellings of identified capacity left unused by the emerging plan

350 of 6,422Homes the plan provides for that sit on no site allocation at all, spread across eighteen villages

0Site-specific allocations in the two lowest tiers of the plan's own settlement hierarchy

4Settlements allocated above their identified capacity — one at 400% of it

2,460Dwellings in the last plan's two strategic sites. Completions to date: nil

One wordDeleted from the neighbourhood-plan test in the Framework published 17 August 2026 — and it decides whether policy S6 is available at all

That last one decides whether a made neighbourhood plan protects anything. Paragraph 14(b) of the December 2024 Framework required a neighbourhood plan to contain policies and allocations to meet its identified housing requirement. Policy S6(1)(b) of the Framework published on 17 August 2026 requires allocations. The five-year limb at (a) is unchanged, so that is the only movement in the test — and this plan allocates sites for Tiers 1 to 4 and gives Tier 5 a target instead. Where S6 is unavailable the proposal falls to be determined under S3: S4 within the settlement, S5 outside it, and where the authority cannot demonstrate five years, S5(1)(j) is engaged in terms.

What this does not say It does not say which Small Villages have made neighbourhood plans, or what any of them allocates; that turns on the made plans themselves. Nor is the emerging plan said to be unsound. The proposition is structural and district-wide, and the plan remains capable of addressing it — it was submitted on 17 April 2026 and examination hearings resume in the week commencing 9 November 2026.

Question four

Is affordable need being met?

37.9% of assessed affordable need delivered across six years — 997 dwellings against 2,634, a shortfall of 1,637.

The gap is widening, not closing: the annual figure has fallen in each of the last four years. The Framework published on 17 August 2026 directs substantial weight to meeting evidenced accommodation needs identified through assessments of exactly this kind.

231 → 117Annual affordable additions across the last four years of the record

£13,400Gap between the income needed to rent privately and to buy at the lower quartile — the widest in the housing market area

18.1%Of households sitting inside that gap: able to meet a market rent, unable to buy

1Genuinely new wholly affordable consent in ten years — and the Council promoted it itself

2.5%Of assessed need represented by every wholly affordable consent granted over the decade

+337%Reported gross homelessness expenditure across five years, the steepest rise in the county

What this is not Assessed need is not a housing requirement, and no figure here is offered as one. The housing register indicates need rather than measuring it, and is not presented as an assessment. Where a needs assessment was made on a superseded definition it is treated as a minimum, not as a comparator.

The full analysis

You have read the summary. The evaluation is the document.

Everything above is stated without its working. The full evaluation carries the arithmetic behind every figure, the schedule each was drawn from, and the notes recording what was done to it and what was deliberately left alone.

It is sent on request, to named recipients. We ask who you are because the document cites live positions that move, and we would rather be able to tell you when one has.

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26pages, covering all four questions in full
20sections across five parts, nineteen carrying a table and notes
24measures, with the benchmark and basis for each
3schedules of sources — authority documents, national policy and data, and conventions
0figures carried from an unpublished source

How it was built

One baseline. Nothing blended.

Every figure of supply comes from a single schedule — the Council's own most recent deliverable-sites appendix — and nothing is taken from an earlier statement to improve the picture. Application status was established by checking the authority's published register, application by application, on a stated base date.

Published figures are recorded as published, including where they do not reconcile. Where a point tells against the client it is volunteered rather than waited for, and identified as such where it arises. Twenty-six pages, twenty sections, three schedules of sources, and no figure carried from an unpublished one.

What extends

The method is national.

Nothing in the four questions is particular to Harborough. Every measure runs on evidence each local planning authority in England already publishes: a deliverable-supply schedule, a monitoring report, a needs assessment, a site availability assessment, and a planning register.

We began in the East Midlands, but the coverage is not the constraint — any authority in England can be evaluated to this depth. What varies is how much of the evidence base it has published, and that is established before anything is quoted. The districts worked to date are listed under method.

Commission this for your authority.

An initial report sets out all twenty-four measures. It is then kept current — re-cut quarterly, or on request whenever a position moves. Pricing turns on how much of the evidence base the authority has published, so tell us the authority and we will quote.