Croydon's planning committee is about to lose 72% of its caseload. Here's who decides your scheme instead.

From 31 October 2026 the national scheme of delegation applies in Croydon, as in every English planning authority. Applications for 1 to 9 homes on sites under half a hectare, householder applications and minor commercial schemes must be decided by planning officers. No committee, no councillor call-in, no exceptions.

In Croydon that is a substantial change. Of the committee decisions in our archive over the last twelve months whose application type is classified, 72 per cent (31 of 43) were exactly these minor and householder applications. Under the new rules, nearly three quarters of what Croydon's members debated last year would never have reached them.

What still gets a committee

Major schemes, departures from the development plan and applications a chief planning officer and a nominated member jointly certify as significant can still be heard, by a committee now capped at 13 members. Our archive of Croydon committee behaviour remains the record of how those members vote when the larger cases come.

What replaces the committee for everyone else

A named case officer. And officers differ. Across Croydon's active case officers we measure approval rates ranging from 33 to 91 per cent — a spread of 58 percentage points between the most and least permissive officers handling comparable application types in the same borough.

For anyone bringing a small scheme forward in Croydon the practical consequence is simple: the political risk is gone, the human risk is measurable, and it is measurable in advance. Before you buy the site or fix the design, you can know whether your application is officer-decided (for 1 to 9 homes it is), and what the officers deciding schemes like yours in Croydon have done before.

The officer who handles your application is not interchangeable. In Croydon, approval rates across active officers span 58 percentage points — a difference that matters before you commit.