The current government has placed much emphasis on the perceived delays and chilling effects to the delivery of major infrastructure projects as a result of judicial review challenges by project opponents (framed as so-called ‘NIMBYs’ or ‘blockers’), and has introduced some reforms targeted at minimising the impacts of these challenges following an independent review commissioned by the previous Sunak government. Among the issues raised in that independent review was the time taken for infrastructure challenges to proceed through the courts. Government has taken this concern seriously, and separately announced in October 2025 that it: 

will work with the judiciary to cut the amount of time it takes for a judicial review to move through the court system for nationally critical infrastructure projects by around half a year. 

Yet, outside of the specific context of Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, a broader issue with timescales for planning judicial reviews may be bubbling away under the surface. The author of the above independent review, the planning barrister and Conservative peer, Lord Banner KC, tabled a written question in the House of Lords on 26 February, asking the Ministry of Justice:

what assessment they have made of the reasons for the backlog of cases in the Planning Court concerning challenges to planning permissions granted under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990; and what solutions they are considering to address the backlog.

In a LinkedIn post highlighting his written question, Lord Banner suggested ‘that Planning Court timescales appear to be slipping’, drawing attention to ‘several recent judicial and statutory reviews taking a year or more from the challenged decision to the Court’s determination of the claim.’ Lord Banner provided two examples handed down in the previous week, R (Sandy Park Farms) [2026] EWHC 422 (Admin) and Wiltshire Council [2026] EWHC 463 (Admin), both of which saw the courts uphold the grants of planning permission, for almost 700 new homes between the two cases, but which each took almost a year to resolve from the grant of permission. Lord Banner was clear that this was not a criticism of Planning Court judges or staff, but an apparently systemic problem that ‘the Court is over-worked and under-resourced.’ In a separate LinkedIn post discussing R (Sandy Park Farms), Lord Banner noted: 

There seems to be a growing consensus that timescales in the Planning Court have crept up in the last 1-2 years, perhaps as a result of constraints on court resources.

Lord Banner’s written question received a response on 12 March from Baroness Levitt KC, Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Justice:

There is no backlog of cases in the Planning Court concerning challenges to planning permissions granted under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. This position has been confirmed by the Court.

Significant claims in the Planning Court are managed in accordance with the targets set out in the Practice Direction. Other cases in the Planning Court are managed in accordance with the arrangements which apply to claims in the Administrative Court. The Planning Liaison Judge oversees claims in the Planning Court and ensures these are progressed efficiently.

We therefore arrive at a fundamental disagreement as to the state of play: a highly respected planning KC, apparently reporting a ‘growing consensus’ among practitioners, highlights slipping court timescales in the last 1-2 years. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice and the Planning Court itself deny that this is the case. So, this debate has developed without publicly available data analysis, meaning that it is difficult to know how far the delays felt and reported by practitioners, but denied by the government and Planning Court, are sustained by the data. This blogpost seeks to respond to this issue.

What do the data tell us?

The data used here are taken from the judicial review statistics contained in the most recent version of the civil justice statistics, which the Ministry of Justice releases quarterly. This version was published on 5 March 2026, and includes information on judicial review claims from 2000 up to December 2025. The statistics provide useful descriptive data showing, among other things, the volume of caseloads, progress of cases through the judicial review system, the case topics and public body challenged, and the timeliness of cases meeting certain milestones, including resolution. 

            In order to understand the timescales of planning challenges, I filtered the information to include only cases from 2014 onwards – as the Planning Court list within the Administrative Court was introduced midway through 2013 – and to include only ‘town and country planning’ and ‘town and country planning (significant)’ cases. Town and country planning (significant) claims are those which the Planning Court has listed as particularly important and therefore requiring expedited listings according to demanding timescales. It is worth making a few brief notes on what these data choices may include and exclude. First, the judicial review statistics by definition do not include information on statutory planning reviews, such as where a local authority or applicant for planning permission challenges a decision of the Planning Inspectorate on whether to grant or refuse planning permission following a planning appeal. This includes cases such as Wiltshire Council highlighted above, which proceeded under s.288 Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Second, including only town and country planning (TCP) and town and country planning (significant) (TCP(S)) claims may mean that some other relevant claims may be excluded, such as those listed under the separate category of ‘transport’. However, given the debate thus far has proceeded in relation to challenges under the Town and Country Planning Act, and ‘transport’-related judicial reviews may have a far wider ambit, it was decided to avoid an over-inclusive approach and risk excluding some relevant cases. Third, a number of judicial review challenges to Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) are likely to be captured within the TCP(S) category, meaning that not all cases within the data will be ‘ordinary’ town and country planning decisions relating to planning permissions initially determined by local authorities. However, the Ministry of Justice statistics do not distinguish between decisions on NSIPs and ordinary town and country planning claims, and there have in any event been very few judicial review challenges on NSIPs compared to the wider planning caseload – Lord Banner’s independent review identified 34 claims between 2008 and 2024. By contrast, the judicial review statistics between 2014 and 2025 record 2,656 judicial review claims within the TCP and TCP(S) categories.

            The statistics provide the time in days between each case being lodged and certain milestones being met (where relevant to each case). These milestones include: the application for permission to bring judicial review being considered; a permission application being orally renewed (where permission was first refused by the court and the claimant asks the court to reconsider); the hearing of the full judicial review; and the case being closed (whether following a court decision or being withdrawn or settled out-of-court, though it is not always clear which of these has occurred). The table below sets out the mean and median timescales, according to the Ministry of Justice statistics, between TCP and TCP(S) claims being lodged and each of these milestones being met in relevant cases, in the years 2014-2023. This includes 2,249 judicial review claims.

Table 1: Average timescales (in days) in TCP and TCP(S) judicial reviews (2014-2023) – 2,249 claims
Lodging to:	Mean	Median
Permission	72	53
Oral renewal	134	113
Hearing	234	213
Close	183	132

By contrast, the below table sets out the mean and median timescales between TCP and TCP(S) claims being lodged and each milestone, in the years 2024-2025. This includes 407 judicial review claims. Not all of these claims have concluded – while it is possible to exclude cases which remain open, they were retained as they do not impact the statistics on cases being closed but provide useful information on recent timescales for the earlier parts of the judicial review process. In any event, the statistics are not meaningfully different when open cases are excluded.

Table 2: Average timescales (in days) in TCP and TCP(S) judicial reviews (2024-2025) – 407 claims
Lodging to:	Mean	Median
Permission	99	77
Oral renewal	168	145
Hearing	215	204
Close	159	134

Focusing only on cases lodged in 2025, there were 209 judicial reviews. As above, many of these remain open but were retained in the data analysis. It should be noted when interpreting these data that only 11 claims lodged in 2025 had proceeded to full hearings according to the statistics. As such, the timescales from lodging to full hearingspecifically are taken from a very small set of cases and should not be taken as evidence of a wider trend.

Table 3: Average timescales (in days) in TCP and TCP(S) judicial reviews (2025) – 209 claims
Lodging to:	Mean	Median
Permission	107	95
Oral renewal	163	145
Hearing	177	185
Close	129	113

What can we make of this? It appears that the timescales between lodging a claim and the claim reaching permission have slowed notably. Claims took an average of 99 days to be listed in 2024-25 and an average of 107 days to be listed in 2025, compared with 72 days in 2014-23. This means that, compared to the average situation in 2014-23, it has taken 37.5% longer for cases to reach the first consideration of permission in 2024-25. Further, compared with the 2014-23 caseload, in the 2025 caseload it has taken 48.6% longer to reach permission. Equally, for oral renewals, the average timescale compared with the 2014-23 caseload has risen by 25.4% in 2024-25, and by 21.6% in 2025. This lends weight to Lord Banner’s argument that timescales in the last two years have slipped.

However, the time taken to reach hearings and for cases to close tells a different story, of shorter timescales than the 2014-23 caseload. What might explain this? It is possible that any caseload pressures are most keenly felt in the earlier stages of proceedings. However, as briefly discussed above, an alternative and more likely explanation relates to the low numbers of claims in the dataset which had reached a full hearing by the time of the statistics being published. This means that the cases which have been closed during these years are more likely to be those which were refused permission, withdrawn, or settled out-of-court – that is, those taking less time to conclude. The time taken for cases to close in the statistics from 2024 onwards (and especially 2025) is therefore likely to be skewed towards those that close more quickly, and to under-represent those which are prone to take longer due to full hearings, which may not have occurred in time to be reflected in the published data. Given this, it may currently be that the most reliable figures on relatively recent trends in the time taken for cases to reach a hearing and to close will come from cases initially lodged in the previous two years (2022-2023). Table 4 shows, for those two years, the time taken from the case being lodged to the hearing and to the case being closed. Compared to the wider figures for cases lodged between 2014-23, cases lodged between 2022-23 took 20.5% longer on average to reach a hearing, and 16.4% longer on average to conclude. 

Table 4: Average timescales (in days) in TCP and TCP(S) judicial reviews (2022-23) – 394 claims
Lodging to:	Mean	Median
Hearing	282	254
Close	213	171

These data are imperfect, particularly given the full picture on hearings and cases closing during this period may not emerge sufficiently clearly until months later. Taken in the round, though, the data lend some further support to Lord Banner’s contention that timescales in the Planning Court have ‘slipped’ in recent years. The evidence for this is most compelling in relation to the time taken to reach the permission and oral renewal stages in 2024 and 2025. Certainly, it would be helpful for the evidence on which the government and Planning Court maintain that there is ‘no backlog of cases’ to be made publicly accessible. 

            Insofar as this blogpost has strengthened the argument that Planning Court timescales have become slower in recent years, we can only speculate as to the precise explanation for any such slipping. Lord Banner has attributed this to systemic under-resourcing of the Court, which would chime with wider themes in discussions around justice funding in public law and more broadly. In the context of delivering housebuilding and infrastructure, critics often point to the role of ‘citizen voice’ – the increased ability of citizens since around the 1960s to participate in and assert influence on decision-making through political avenues and through judicial review. A critique is often made that openness to citizen voice produces a resulting sclerosis, which has contributed to a decline in state capacity (the government’s ability to effectively do its job). This fuels contentious debates around ‘NIMBY’ campaigners ‘blocking’ delivery of important projects by ‘gumming up’ the courts with judicial reviews, a line of critique which, in an article in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies last year, I referred to as relating to ‘litigant power’. Yet, without needing to come to a view on these debates, if under-resourcing in the Planning Court is producing the apparent slipping in its timescales, this ought to encourage attention to its capacity (as a feature of state capacity) to process town and country planning claims efficiently while maintaining effective access to justice. Admittedly, a suggestion to increase court resources to deal with judicial review challenges may not be an eye-catching proposal for galvanising housing and infrastructure policy. Yet it is possible that, through leading to swifter listing and decision-making, it may yield considerable productivity gains, relative to the additional resource required, and ultimately quicker implementation of those projects which survive challenge.

I am grateful to Joe Tomlinson for discussions on this post, and to the UKCLA blog editors for helpful comments. 

Dr Sam Guy is Lecturer in Law at the University of York.

This work (from the study ‘Access to justice in legal challenges to infrastructure projects’) has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation, but the views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the Foundation. Visit nuffieldfoundation.org.  

(Suggested citation: S. Guy, ‘Are judicial reviews in the Planning Court taking too long?’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (23rd March 2026) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))