Official Statistics

Revision Note 18 September 2025

Updated 18 September 2025

Applies to England

The administration of Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project applications have relied on spreadsheets for casework management, into which casework records are manually entered, reviewed and updated. The Planning Inspectorate is currently building an improved casework management system and, alongside that, is additionally creating an improved process for processing and reporting on data. This involves a review of data held in multiple sources that were previously published as Official Statistics and on the Nationally Significant Infrastructure website.

We have reviewed the two metrics reported: applications accepted for examination and recommendation reports submitted. We have made revisions to tables 1.1a and 1.1b, which affects several values between 2012 and 2023 (see Table 1.1c).

The following revisions were made:

• Fixing inconsistencies in recording the number of recommendation reports submitted
• Renaming ‘decision reports’ to ‘recommendation reports’ in the column headings
• Ensuring that the number of withdrawn cases are reported accurately

Table 1.1c: Summary of changes made affecting individual values in the reporting of Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects. Note that these changes have also affected some of the corresponding totals in the tables.

	Table 1.1a	Table 1.1b
Values which have increased by up to 3	14	28
Values which have decreased by up to 3	12	27
Values which remain unchanged	78	369
Total	104	424

The revised numbers published here in this release of the Official Statistics differ only from the data held on the Nationally Significant Infrastructure website due to the data retention policies on withdrawn cases, which requires us to depublish project details 1 year following the date of withdrawal for applications received.