London’s restaurant planning speed score reached 49.8 out of 100 for the trailing 12 months to February 2026, up 4.9 points on the year, with 240 of 482 observed applications receiving a favourable decision within 180 days. But this measures planning cases only, and many ordinary restaurant changes never need a full application at all, so the score tells you about the harder projects filtering through planning, not the health of London’s restaurant scene as a whole.
Anyone reading press coverage of new London restaurant openings could be forgiven for assuming planning is moving quickly to match the pace of announcements. Authority Inc’s London Restaurant Planning Speed Index suggests a more complicated picture, tracking only the comparable restaurant, café, pub and takeaway applications that require full planning permission, and separating that narrower measure from the wider opening pipeline.
What the Restaurant Planning Speed Index Actually Measures
The index defines planning speed as the share of observed qualifying applications receiving a favourable recorded decision within 180 days of validation. A qualifying application has to explicitly concern a restaurant, café, pub, takeaway or food-and-drink use, and the cohort is only published once outcome coverage clears 90%.
For the latest mature period, that produced a score of 49.8 from 482 observed applications, of which 240 met the 180-day rule, with 95.6% outcome coverage. In practical terms, roughly one in two qualifying restaurant-related applications in London is currently getting a timely favourable decision.
Why Many New Restaurants Never Show Up in the Data
This is the detail that most coverage of restaurant openings misses. Class E, a broad commercial use class, allows many changes between shops, restaurants and other commercial uses to happen without a full planning application at all. That means a large share of ordinary restaurant openings simply sit outside this index by design.
What’s left, as a result, skews toward projects that genuinely need permission: ventilation and extraction systems, new terraces, pub conversions, takeaway shopfronts and substantial building work. So when the index moves, it’s describing planning outcomes for a specific, more complex slice of the restaurant sector, not the sector’s overall growth rate.
How Planning Speed Has Moved Since 2021
The historical pattern is a decline followed by a partial recovery. The rolling score sat around 47 in late 2021, fell to roughly 41 by early 2024, and has since climbed back to 49.8 by February 2026. That’s a meaningful round trip, not a straight line of improvement.
The earlier fall coincides with planning teams absorbing a post-pandemic application surge with reduced staffing, a plausible contributor identified in the data. The subsequent recovery lines up with higher planning fees and tighter statutory decision deadlines, which appear to have strengthened planning capacity and added urgency to processing.
What’s Driving the 2024 to 2026 Recovery
Independent commentary attached to the index adds useful nuance here. Isabella L.B., PhD, a senior land and development specialist at AtkinsRéalis, points to two main explanations, while noting her background is in residential and mixed-use development rather than the restaurant sector specifically.
Her first explanation is the Class E effect itself: because routine restaurant-to-restaurant or shop-to-restaurant changes increasingly avoid full applications, the applications still going through planning are more concentrated in complex, permission-hungry projects. Her second is a genuine partial recovery in the wider planning system, driven by lower congestion, fee changes and tighter deadlines. She treats a proposed policy restricting takeaways near schools as a likely red herring at the market level, since such cases are too rare to meaningfully move an index built on hundreds of applications a month.
Why Borough-Level Results Diverge So Much
London-wide figures obscure real differences between boroughs, even within the smaller restaurant-planning dataset. Among boroughs with enough observed cases to compare, Brent recorded 68.4, Ealing 55.0 and Southwark 53.8, all comfortably above the London average. Westminster, despite handling the largest volume of restaurant-related applications in the sample at 63 observed cases, scored close to the London average at 49.2. Tower Hamlets came in at 44.4, and Croydon at 40.0, the lowest of the group shown.
These borough figures come from smaller samples than the citywide headline number, so they should be read as informative comparisons rather than a settled league table. Still, the spread reinforces a wider point: a restaurant operator’s planning experience depends heavily on which borough is deciding the case, and on whether the project needs extraction, a terrace, alcohol licensing changes or other work that pulls it into full planning in the first place.
Openings Pipeline vs Planning Reality
London’s restaurant opening pipeline looks active by any measure. Time Out confirmed a 26,400 sq ft flagship market for 55 Regent Street, expected to open in the first half of 2028 with around 15 hospitality operators. Caravan announced its largest site to date on the Southbank, and Beefbar is opening a new Soho flagship with a redesigned terrace.
These announcements are genuine signals of continued investor and operator confidence in London hospitality. But a confirmed opening and a resolved planning application measure two different stages of the same journey, and a multi-year lead time between announcement and opening, as with the Time Out project, is a reminder that restaurant property commitments and actual trading openings need to be tracked separately from each other, and separately again from planning speed.
What This Means for Operators and Investors
For anyone assessing a restaurant, café, pub or takeaway project in London, the practical read is straightforward. If a project can proceed as a straightforward Class E change of use, it may bypass the planning bottleneck the index describes entirely. If it needs extraction, a terrace, alcohol licensing works, or substantial alterations, expect a planning process where outcomes vary meaningfully by borough, and where a roughly even chance of a timely favourable decision is currently the London norm rather than the exception.
The wider lesson is one of separating signals. A strong announcement pipeline, a recovering planning index, and actual restaurant survival rates are three different things, and treating any one of them as proof of the others will lead to the wrong conclusion about how easy it currently is to open and run a restaurant in London. Authority Inc publishes a wider set of live industry indexes built on the same evidence standards, which is a useful next stop for anyone tracking planning risk across other London sectors as well.
Frequently Asked Questions
How quickly are London restaurant planning applications being approved right now?
In the latest mature cohort, 240 of 482 observed restaurant, café, pub and takeaway applications received a favourable recorded decision within 180 days, giving a planning speed score of 49.8 out of 100 for the 12 months to February 2026.
Why don’t all new London restaurants show up in this data?
Class E rules allow many ordinary changes between shops, restaurants and other commercial uses to happen without a full planning application. The index mainly captures cases that still require planning, such as extraction, terraces, pubs, takeaways or substantial building work.
Is London restaurant planning speed improving?
Yes, in the measured data. The score rose from 44.9 in February 2025 to 49.8 in February 2026, a 4.9 point increase, following a decline from around 47 in 2021 to roughly 41 in early 2024.
Does a favourable planning decision mean a restaurant will open successfully?
No. Planning is only one hurdle. Fit-out, licensing, finance, staffing and eventual commercial survival all sit outside this index and need to be assessed on their own terms.
