Planning permission in Plymouth

How long does planning permission take in Plymouth?

Half of decided applications took 51 days or less from validation to decision. The middle 50% of applications took between 39 and 63 days, and 70.8% were decided inside the 8-week statutory target for minor applications. Major applications run to a 13-week target, or 16 weeks where an environmental impact assessment is required, and contested schemes take longer still.

The Plymouth local plan

The development plan is the Plymouth and South West Devon Joint Local Plan 2014-2034, adopted by the city council on 26 March 2019 and shared with South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council. It replaced the 2007 Core Strategy and all six of the older area action plans outright, with no saved policies carried over, and it is joined by one made neighbourhood plan, for Plympton St Mary, made on 11 June 2019. A joint supplementary planning document adopted in June 2020 amplifies the plan's policies, and a separate schedule of corrections published in September 2022 supersedes it on parking standards, use classes and First Homes. Plymouth is a unitary authority and so sets its own minerals and waste policy, which means the Devon county plans do not apply within the city.

A new Plymouth Local Plan is being prepared, but it is at the very earliest stage and carries no weight. The three councils agreed in January 2025 that there would be no successor joint plan, and Plymouth formally began work on a plan covering its own boundaries on 25 June 2026. A scoping consultation ran through July 2026. No draft policies exist yet and adoption is not expected until April 2029, so the Joint Local Plan remains the plan of record until then.

What tends to shape decisions here: The housing position is the thing most often misread here. The Housing Delivery Test result is 113 per cent, which sounds comfortable and carries no consequence, but the councils' own position statement from October 2025 identifies only 2.33 years of housing land supply across the joint plan area, so the presumption in favour of sustainable development is engaged. The council has also accepted that the plan's housing provision figure is now out of date against national policy. Working against that, two constraints frequently switch the presumption back off. Plymouth Sound and the Tamar estuaries are protected European sites, and because the whole city sits inside their 12.3km zone of influence every net new home has to contribute to recreation mitigation, funded through the levy rather than a separate agreement. The city also has more twentieth century listed buildings than anywhere else in the country, alongside 15 conservation areas, so heritage regularly proves decisive. There is no Green Belt anywhere in Plymouth and no part of Dartmoor National Park falls within the city. An Article 4 direction in force since September 2012 removes the right to convert a house into a small shared house across eleven named neighbourhoods.

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Source: decisions published on the Plymouth City Council public planning register, two years to August 2026. Approval rate = approvals divided by approvals plus refusals; withdrawn applications and other outcomes are excluded. We track 11,153 Plymouth applications in total. Plan facts as of July 2026; always check the council's own pages for the latest position.