Do you need planning permission?

So you've got an idea of what you want to build, you've maybe had a builder round to have a look and give you a rough figure, and now somebody has said the word planning and you're wondering whether this is going to be a three month wait or whether it's something you can just get on with next month?

It's the question we get asked more than any other, and a lot of the time the answer is better news than people expect. Plenty of the work we design doesn't need planning permission at all. Extensions, loft conversions, garage conversions, porches, sheds, outbuildings, a great deal of it falls under what's called Permitted Development, which is the government's way of saying yes in principle so that nobody has to ask again every time somebody wants a bigger kitchen.

The catch is that Permitted Development is a good deal narrower than most people assume, and on a fair number of properties it has been taken away completely. Building something you needed permission for when you didn't get it is one of the more expensive mistakes you can make to a house, and it can sit there quietly for years until you try to sell. So it's worth ten minutes finding out where you stand before you spend anything at all, and if it does turn out you need to apply then how planning applications work sets out what's involved.

Permitted Development is a national set of allowances letting you carry out certain building work without submitting a planning application, and it's been part of our planning system since the Town and Country Planning Act came in back in 1948. The thinking behind it was sensible enough. If every homeowner in the country had to make a formal application for a small rear extension or a loft conversion, the planning system would seize up entirely dealing with thousands of applications a year that nobody was ever going to object to, and the things that genuinely need scrutiny would be stuck in the queue behind them.

Because the rights are set nationally, they don't change from one council to the next. What's allowed in Belper is allowed in Mansfield.

We hear people say all the time that one council is stricter than another, and on Permitted Development that just isn't the case, because there's no discretion involved. Either the work meets the conditions or it doesn't. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have their own version of the rules, so anything you read online might not apply here, but within England the allowances are identical wherever you live.

What varies enormously is your property, and that's where all the detail lives. Every category of work carries its own set of conditions covering how far the thing can project from the original wall, how tall it can be at the eaves and at the ridge, how close it can sit to a boundary, what materials it can be built from, how much of the garden it's allowed to cover, and in some cases whether any part of it can be seen from a road at the front. You have to satisfy every single one of those conditions rather than most of them, and it only takes one to fail. Miss it and the whole thing drops out of Permitted Development, and you're back to needing an application whether you wanted one or not.

We're not going to quote the specific dimensions in this article. They've been amended several times over the years and anything written down here would be out of date within a few years of writing it, which is exactly the problem with a lot of the advice floating about online. What matters far more, and what changes far less, is whether the allowances apply to your house in the first place, because for a surprising number of properties around here they don't apply at all.

There are six situations we run into regularly, and any one of them on its own can take your rights away.

If you live in a flat or a maisonette you have no Permitted Development rights whatsoever. Not reduced rights, none at all, and every alteration needs planning permission. It catches people out and it's the first thing we check when somebody rings us about a flat, because there's no point discussing anything else until that's established.

Listed buildings are a world of their own. Listed Building Consent is a separate approval from planning permission and you can very easily need both of them, and unlike planning it covers the inside of the building as well as the outside, which means work nobody could ever see from the street can still need consent because it's very often the internal features that are the actual reason the building is listed, things like original staircases, plasterwork, panelling and fireplaces. This is also the one where the consequences are genuinely serious rather than merely expensive, because altering a listed building without consent is a criminal offence rather than a planning breach, and in extreme cases people have been prosecuted. Please don't guess with a listed building.

Conservation Areas take away some of your rights but not all of them, and the ones that go are side extensions, cladding, roof alterations and certain outbuildings. A decent chunk of Derbyshire sits inside one, including a few places people genuinely wouldn't expect, so it's worth actually checking rather than assuming somebody would have told you.

Then there are Article 4 Directions, and these are the ones nobody sees coming. An Article 4 Direction is where the council has formally removed Permitted Development rights across a particular street, an estate, or sometimes a whole village, usually to protect the character of the place or to stop front gardens being turned wholesale into parking. There is nothing on your house to tell you one exists. It isn't in your deeds. Your neighbours very likely don't know either, and if they've built something recently without any bother that doesn't prove anything, because they might have applied and got permission and simply not mentioned it. You have to know the thing exists in order to go looking for it, and most people don't.

Conditions on the original planning permission are the next one. If your house was built any time in the last thirty years or so, the permission that allowed it to be built may well have had a condition attached removing Permitted Development rights, and that condition binds you now even though it was agreed with a developer long before you ever saw the place. We come across this constantly on estates built from the nineties onwards. Sometimes it's a blanket removal covering everything, and sometimes it's specific and narrow, like a requirement that the garage has to stay available for parking a car in.

And finally, previous extensions count against you, which is the one that catches the most people out by a long way. Your allowance is worked out against the original house as it was first built rather than as it stands today, so if somebody extended it in 1987 and then again in 2004, they have quietly used up your allowance and there may be nothing left. The house you bought looks like it has acres of room to extend into. On paper you may have none at all.

A fair bit of it you can do yourself if you've got an evening spare. Councils publish their Conservation Area maps and their Article 4 Directions online, though the information is buried to wildly different depths depending on which authority you're dealing with, and Amber Valley, Derby City, Nottingham City, Chesterfield, Mansfield and North East Derbyshire all present it differently. You can also look up the planning history of your own address on the council's online register, which will show you the original permission for the house and any conditions that came attached to it, and that's usually the most useful ten minutes you can spend.

Most councils also run a pre-application advice service, where you pay a fee and get a written opinion from a planning officer before committing to a full application. On anything unusual or genuinely borderline that money is very often well spent, because an officer saying in writing that they'd be minded to support something carries real weight later when the application goes in and lands on somebody else's desk.

Or you can just ask us and save yourself the evening. We check all of it as a matter of course before we draw a single line, because we know where to look on each council's site and it takes us a few minutes rather than half a day. Conservation Area status, Article 4, the original permission and every condition on it, and whether the house has already been extended past its allowance.

If your work does fall under Permitted Development you can apply to the council for a Certificate of Lawful Development, which is sometimes called a lawful development certificate, and it's a formal confirmation in writing that what you've built was lawful and never needed permission in the first place.

It isn't compulsory. Plenty of people build under Permitted Development, never apply for one, and never have a moment's trouble over it.

We'd still suggest getting one, and the reason has nothing to do with the building work and everything to do with what happens years later when you come to sell. The buyer's solicitor is going to ask what approvals exist for that extension or that loft conversion, because it's a standard enquiry and they ask it on every sale. If you can hand over a certificate from the council then that's the end of the conversation and the sale carries on as normal. If you can't, you're asking a stranger's solicitor to take your word for it that permission wasn't needed, and in our experience they very often won't, because it isn't their job to take anybody's word for anything. We've seen sales held up for weeks over exactly this, and we've seen money come off an asking price because the paperwork wasn't there and the buyer got nervous.

It's also considerably easier to obtain before you build than fifteen years afterwards, when nobody can remember quite what was there before, the builder has retired, and there are no photographs of the foundations. (We can sort this out for you, please just ask.)

This is the part that costs people the most money and we'd ask you to read it twice.

Planning permission and Building Regulations are two entirely separate approvals, dealt with by two different departments, and they answer two completely different questions. Planning is concerned with what your building looks like and how it affects everybody else, so its size, its position, whether it overlooks the neighbours, whether it fits the street. Building Regulations couldn't care less what it looks like and are concerned instead with whether the thing is structurally safe, properly insulated, adequately ventilated, correctly drained, and possible to get out of in a fire.

So you can very easily need Building Regulations approval and no planning permission at all. That's the position for most loft conversions. It's the position for taking out a load bearing wall, for a garage conversion, and for a great many extensions built comfortably within Permitted Development.

Which means somebody telling you that you don't need planning permission has told you one useful thing, that one of the two approvals doesn't apply to you. The other one still does, and building without it means no completion certificate at the end of the project, which brings you straight back round to that solicitor asking awkward questions when you sell. There's more on all of this in our article on the difference between planning permission and Building Regulations.

It isn't a criminal offence. Unless the building is listed, in which case it is.

What the council can do is serve an enforcement notice requiring you to alter the work or take it down altogether. You can apply for retrospective planning permission and sometimes that succeeds, but you're negotiating from a genuinely weak position because the thing is already standing there and everybody involved knows it, and the officer's starting point is that you didn't ask. If retrospective permission is refused you can appeal, and if the appeal goes against you as well then it gets very expensive very quickly.

There used to be a four year rule, under which a breach became immune from enforcement four years after the work was completed. The time limits in England changed in April 2024 and it's now ten years for most breaches. Chris's older posts on this site quote the four year figure, which was perfectly correct when they were written and isn't any more, and it's worth mentioning because a great deal of the advice still sitting online says four years and hasn't caught up. Either way, waiting a decade and hoping nobody notices is not a plan.

The other thing worth knowing is that enforcement almost never starts with an officer driving past and spotting something. It starts with a phone call from somebody who's annoyed. So if what you're planning is likely to upset the people next door, the odds of quietly getting away with it are a good deal worse than you might be hoping.

Get somebody out to look at it before anything is drawn and before you commit to a builder or a start date.

We come to your house, look at what's actually there rather than what the drawings say, listen to what you're trying to achieve and why, and tell you honestly whether it needs permission. We check the Conservation Area status, we check for an Article 4 Direction, we look up the original permission and read the conditions on it, and we work out whether a previous owner has already spent your allowance for you.

If you don't need permission we'll tell you so, and you've saved yourself an application and a couple of months of waiting about. If you do need it then at least you know now, rather than after you've paid somebody to draw the wrong thing twice. And either way you'll come away knowing roughly what the whole project involves and how long it takes from start to finish, which is usually the thing people most want and least often get.

That first visit is free and there's no obligation at the end of it.

For more information please call us on 07773 899 597 or contact us through this website.