Updated 20 September 2026
Permission is not delivery
In the East of England, CPRE counted 75,212 leftover-land homes with some form of planning permission — 57% of the list. Permission is a weak stand-in for houses actually getting built. CPRE's earlier national work found sites under construction or finished were about 2% of the listed capacity.
What the list actually means
Councils list leftover sites they judge suitable, available and achievable for housing. Some already have planning permission. That is the figure people often treat as ready to go.
CPRE's State of Brownfield 2025, using 2024 registers, put England's permissioned share at 55% and the East of England's at 57%. Those are the best compiled regional figures. They are still a stock of consents, not a flow of completions.
Why permission overstates delivery
- Conditions can freeze a consent. Nutrient neutrality in Norfolk is the clearest regional example: overnight accommodation cannot be occupied, and in places cannot even be granted, until credits exist.
- Residual value can collapse after consent if remediation, flood works or biodiversity net gain costs rise.
- Estate regeneration and town-centre sites take years and often come back for revised consents at lower capacity.
- CPRE's historical national work found that sites recorded as under construction or completed were about 2% of minimum housing capacity in the 2019 analysis.
How to read the map
The permission step is the first screen on the walk, and the only one that keeps sites rather than removing them: everything the register does not record as permissioned drops out here. It is deliberately generous. A recorded permission does not mean those homes are being built, or that the consent is still live, and every later step happens to land that has already cleared this bar.
Register statuses are free text in places — this site reads permissions, prior approvals and started sites as permissioned, and treats awaiting, pending, refused, withdrawn and lapsed as not.
Questions people ask
- Does planning permission mean the homes will be built?
- No. Permission shows a site has cleared one legal test. It does not prove the owner will build, that the scheme remains viable, or that conditions such as nutrient mitigation have been discharged.
- How much of the East's register is permissioned?
- CPRE's 2025 report, using 2024 data, put 75,212 of 132,338 East of England minimum net dwellings in the permissioned column — 57%, a little above the 55% national average.
Where the numbers come from
- State of Brownfield 2025 — CPRE, 1 September 2025. Uses 2024 register data. East of England: 132,338 minimum net dwellings, of which 75,212 (57%) had planning permission.
- Brownfield land dataset — Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 20 September 2026. National aggregation of Part 1 registers. Points, not polygons. Coverage may be incomplete. Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Town and Country Planning (Brownfield Land Register) Regulations 2017 — legislation.gov.uk, 16 April 2017