Between October to December 2021 district level planning authorities in England granted 9,500 residential applications, down 7% on a year earlier.
Of that number 1,200 were for major developments and 8,300 for minor developments.
The news of the decline comes at a time when the UK is facing a housing supply shortage which has partly contributed to the surge in house prices.
And new housing supply is currently lower than the Government’s ambition of 300,000 new homes per year.
216,000 new homes were supplied in 2020/21 which is lower than the 243,000 new homes supplied in the previous year, in part because of disruption to housebuilding caused by Covid-19 in early 2020.
Lewis Shaw, founder of Mansfield-based Shaw Financial Services, said: “Once again we have evidence of rank incompetence from the Tory party.
“Now it’s planning suffering when we’ve already got a housing crisis. We have a structural supply side problem with not enough homes as it is and they’re baking in the problem further.
“With a recession around the corner, I’m reminded of the words of Aristotle: ‘Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime’.”
Ross Boyd, founder of the always-on mortgage comparison platform, Dashly.com, added: “A drop in the number of residential planning applications during the fourth quarter of last year is not want you see and will exacerbate the already dire lack of supply.
“We need to desperately build more homes but if the planning is falling short, that becomes a Mission Impossible.”
Rhys Schofield, managing director at Belper-based Peak Mortgages and Protection, concluded: “7% fewer residential applications agreed than a year before and we wonder why house prices are going through the roof.
“Until we build more houses as a nation that are fit for purpose, any work done to help get people on the ladder is merely tinkering round the edges because we are seemingly happy to blindly ignore the root cause of the problem, namely supply. Supply is obscenely low.”
