Opportunity, By the Numbers01 / 08

House London #0 — Data Hackathon · Newspeak House · 1 August 2026

Opportunity,
By the Numbers

Planning approval inside London's Opportunity Areas — and what a decade of applications says about who gets to build.

ChristineTeam SharugaTeam WilliamTeam
wwstorymode.github.io/oa-planning-map
Opportunity, By the Numbers02 / 08

The Question

What is the approval rate of planning permission inside an Opportunity Area — and what can we learn from it?

The 2021 London Plan designated 35 "Opportunity Areas" across the city — places the GLA judged capable of substantial new homes and jobs. We wanted to know whether that designation actually shows up in the planning register: do applications inside these areas get treated any differently from everywhere else?

35
Adopted Opportunity Areas, London-wide
2021
London Plan designation year
10 yrs
Of applications examined, 2016–2026
Opportunity, By the Numbers03 / 08

The Challenge

There's no such thing as an "Opportunity Area" postcode list.

The GLA's own map at apps.london.gov.uk/opportunity-areas is a live boundary layer you can look at — not a dataset you can download. No open source ties an individual postcode to Opportunity Area status. If we wanted to join planning applications to Opportunity Areas, we had to build that link ourselves.

  1. 01Pulled the boundaries live — every adopted Opportunity Area polygon, straight from the GLA's own ArcGIS map service.
  2. 02Pulled every London postcode — coordinates for all 180,983 live postcodes, from the ONS Postcode Directory.
  3. 03Joined them ourselves — a spatial join, postcode-by-postcode, into a reproducible lookup table nobody else had.
Opportunity, By the Numbers04 / 08

The Data

343,141 planning applications, provided by the hackathon.

Every London borough's planning applications, scraped and provided to us for the day as a single database — decisions, dates, and postcodes back to 2016.

Its own borough labels turned out to be unreliable: two boroughs had zero recorded applications under their own name, and several entries belonged to development corporations rather than boroughs at all. So we discarded the labels and matched every application to a borough and an Opportunity Area by its actual postcode — using the lookup we'd already built.

Camden and the City of London had zero applications under their own label in the source data — but 50 and 155 respectively once matched by postcode. The label was wrong; the location wasn't.
343,141
Planning applications, all London boroughs
33
Boroughs matched by postcode, not by label
Opportunity, By the Numbers05 / 08

The Tool

A live, clickable map — not a one-off chart.

Every number is precomputed from the same open pipeline and shipped as a single static page: no server, nothing that goes stale silently. Click any borough or Opportunity Area. Filter by the years an application was submitted. The answer updates instantly.

Screenshot of the live interactive map, showing Tower Hamlets selected with its approval statistics in the sidebar
FIG. 1 Tower Hamlets selected · boroughs mode · 2016–2026 wwstorymode.github.io/oa-planning-map
Opportunity, By the Numbers06 / 08

Finding 01

Opportunity Areas lean slightly more toward approval.

Tower Hamlets, 2016–2026, every application type, 4,426 decided applications. Approved covers Permitted and Permitted-with-Conditions; rejected is a clean refusal.

3.18 : 1
Opportunity Area
2,293 approved · 721 rejected
2.83 : 1
Rest of the borough
1,043 approved · 369 rejected
A real gap, but a modest one — roughly one extra approval in every ten before you'd call it a different regime. Enough to notice; not enough to call Opportunity Area status a rubber stamp.
Opportunity, By the Numbers07 / 08

Finding 02

No government left a fingerprint on the approval rate.

Sharuga's original working analysis asked whether the ratio moved with the Prime Minister of the day. It sparked this chart: the same question, rebuilt on the full dataset, with every UK government and the 2021 London Plan marked on the timeline.

Line chart of Tower Hamlets approved-to-rejected ratio by year, split by Opportunity Area status, annotated with Prime Minister transitions and the 2021 London Plan
FIG. 2 Approved : rejected ratio by year, Opportunity Area vs. rest of borough analysis/tower_hamlets_pm_opportunity_ratio.png
Opportunity, By the Numbers08 / 08

Where This Leaves Us

Real signal, real caveats.

Live mapwwstorymode.github.io/oa-planning-map
Sourcegithub.com/WWStoryMode/oa-planning-map
TeamChristine · Sharuga · William