The 2023 Housing Delivery Test score for every English planning authority was published last week, and I’ve mapped the results to show those areas with the highest and lowest performance against their targets.
The southeast has, as expected, performed particularly poorly with several of the London boroughs falling below 50%. Of these, Lewisham is the worst, with a score of just 32% and a placement sixth from bottom in the national ranking. The highest score of all of the boroughs (with the exception of the City of London) is Croydon, with a score of 160%—although this is likely to diminish in the future now that its new local plan has been adopted, scrapping many of the progressive planning policies which enabled it to build more homes than any other borough bar Brent and Tower Hamlets.
The highest score in the country was Richmondshire, which managed a stonking score of 6,121% which seems extraordinary until one realises that significant overperformance was likely when its absolute housing target was a pitiful 24 homes: just one for every 5,500 hectares of land. It actually built nearly 1,500 homes in the three-year period from 2020-2023; not to be sniffed at, but hardly an exceptional amount considering its size. Richmondshire is no more: in 2023 it was absorbed into a new Unitary Authority covering North Yorkshire.