Planning permission in East Devon
What actually happens to planning applications decided by East Devon District Council: approval rates, decision times, appeal odds and the development plan they are judged against. Figures cover 4,992 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 East Devon?
Half of decided applications took 52 days or less from validation to decision. The middle 50% of applications took between 36 and 85 days, and 60.4% were decided inside the 8-week statutory target for minor applications. Complex or contested schemes take longer.
The East Devon local plan
The development plan has three district documents in force at once: the East Devon Local Plan 2013 to 2031 (adopted January 2016), the East Devon Villages Plan (adopted July 2018), which sets the built up area boundaries for the villages, and the Cranbrook Plan DPD (adopted October 2022) for the new town. Above them sit the Devon Minerals Plan and the Devon Waste Plan, and alongside them 27 made neighbourhood plans covering 28 parishes.
The East Devon Local Plan 2020 to 2042 has been through two Regulation 19 consultations but has not been submitted for examination. The revised timetable targets submission in late October 2026 and adoption during 2028, so it carries limited weight today.
What tends to shape decisions here: East Devon cannot demonstrate a five year housing land supply. Its own monitoring puts the position at 3.50 years at 31 March 2025, so the tilted balance is engaged for housing proposals, even though delivery passes the Housing Delivery Test at 118 per cent. What limits that is the district's constraint map: two National Landscapes, the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site and a habitats mitigation requirement for new homes within 10 km of the Exe Estuary and the Pebblebed Heaths, which is a Habitats Regulations requirement rather than something the balance can outweigh.
If East Devon says no: appeal odds
Between 2021 and 2025 the Planning Inspectorate overturned 33.7% of appealed East Devon refusals (98 of 291 decided appeals). The national average is 31.1%. More detail, including how East Devon ranks nationally: planning appeals in East Devon.
Source: decisions published on the East Devon District 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 Approval rate = approvals divided by approvals plus refusals; withdrawn applications and other outcomes are excluded.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 16,306 East Devon applications in total. Plan facts as of July 2026; always check the council's own pages for the latest position.
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