Planning permission in Shropshire
What actually happens to planning applications decided by Shropshire Council: approval rates, decision times, appeal odds and the development plan they are judged against. Figures cover 8,829 applications decided in the two years to August 2026, from the council's public planning register.
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How long does planning permission take in Shropshire?
Half of decided applications took 47 days or less from validation to decision. The middle 50% of applications took between 34 and 56 days, and 76.4% were decided inside the 8-week statutory target for minor applications. Complex or contested schemes take longer.
The Shropshire local plan
The development plan is the Shropshire Core Strategy (adopted February 2011) and the SAMDev Plan (adopted December 2015), plus nine made neighbourhood plans. Both adopted documents have plan periods that run only to 2026. Shropshire is a unitary authority and its own minerals and waste planning authority.
The draft Shropshire Local Plan 2016 to 2038 was withdrawn from examination in July 2025 and is not policy. Its evidence base remains a material consideration, but nothing in it can be cited as adopted policy or treated as committed development.
What tends to shape decisions here: The age of the plan is the decisive factor. Delivery passes the Housing Delivery Test comfortably at 142 per cent, yet the council states plainly that it cannot demonstrate a five year housing land supply, at 4.61 years, so the tilted balance is engaged on the supply ground alone. That shortfall is an artefact of the time expired plan: because its strategic policies are over five years old, supply is measured against a standard method figure of about 2,030 homes a year rather than the adopted requirement, against which Shropshire would show a surplus. The Shropshire Hills National Landscape and Green Belt in the north east are the main designations.
If Shropshire says no: appeal odds
Between 2021 and 2025 the Planning Inspectorate overturned 29.9% of appealed Shropshire refusals (124 of 414 decided appeals). The national average is 31.1%. More detail, including how Shropshire ranks nationally: planning appeals in Shropshire.
Source: decisions published on the Shropshire 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 Approval rate = approvals divided by approvals plus refusals; withdrawn applications and other outcomes are excluded.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 33,609 Shropshire applications in total. Plan facts as of July 2026; always check the council's own pages for the latest position.
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