The Medium Sized Builds Report Card

Searchland's Medium Sized Builds Report Card - NPPF

Ranked insight into how England and Scotland's councils are actually handling 10-49 home sites under the new NPPF

This report helps you act on the new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), published on 17 August 2026, which created a new "medium development" category for sites of 10-49 homes - and dropped the proposal that would have let developers pay cash instead of delivering affordable housing on-site.

The criteria

We've analysed every qualifying application that meets a defined set of criteria:

• 10-49 dwellings
• Site area of 2.5 hectares or less
• Received on or after 1 January 2024
• England and Scotland local planning authorities

What you'll get

Our data team has combined the new NPPF policy with thousands of Searchland planning records to show what's really happening to medium sites on the ground. Each finding is assessed across four key measures:

• Approval rate
• Decision speed
• Council-by-council performance
• Affordable housing pressure

These measures are used to rank every qualifying council and surface where medium site are actually clearing planning fastest.

What's included

• A sortable league table, covering 216 councils
• National approval rate and decision speed breakdown
• The affordable housing signal - how many medium sites are already using viability assessments

Go further

Want to understand how a specific site or council of yours actually stacks up?

Book a demo with our team and we'll show you how.