How to get planning permission

You've established that your project needs planning permission, and now you'd like to know what you're actually in for. How long it takes, what goes into an application, what happens if the neighbours object, and where you stand if the council says no.

We've been submitting applications from Swanwick, just outside Alfreton, since 2000, across Amber Valley and Derby and Nottingham and a fair way beyond. What follows is how it really works rather than how the guidance leaflets describe it, and if you're not yet certain whether you even need permission then start with whether your project is covered by Permitted Development instead, because there's no sense applying for something you don't need.

Rather more than most people expect, and getting the submission complete is honestly half the battle.

It starts with existing drawings, meaning accurate plans, elevations and sections of your property exactly as it stands today. Not the drawings from 1974 in a drawer in the loft, and definitely not the estate agent's floor plan, which was drawn to sell a house rather than to build from and is very often out by a considerable margin. Everything that follows sits on top of these, so an error here doesn't stay here, it carries through the design and through the application and eventually lands on your builder as a steel beam that turns out to be two hundred millimetres short with the floor already propped.

Then the proposed drawings, which are the same set again showing what you want to build. A site plan showing the property and its boundaries at a standard scale with the application site outlined in red. A location plan showing where you sit in relation to the surrounding roads.

Some applications need a Design and Access Statement on top of that, which is a written document justifying the design and explaining how people will get to and around the building, and while it isn't needed for every householder application you will need one for a listed building, for anything inside a Conservation Area, and for any scheme of real size. Leave it out where it's required and the council can simply refuse to register the application, which means you haven't been refused so much as ignored.

Then there are supporting reports, and which ones you need depends entirely on your site. A tree survey if there's anything protected nearby, and Tree Preservation Orders are more common around here than people realise. An ecology or bat survey where there's any chance of protected species, which comes up regularly in older properties and in outbuildings with open eaves. A drainage assessment on some sites. And across a lot of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, a coal mining risk assessment, because we're sitting on a former coalfield and the council quite reasonably wants to know what's underneath before it lets anybody build on top of it.

Because they haven't been validated, and this is easily the most misunderstood part of the whole process.

The council's eight week clock doesn't start when you press submit. It starts when the council validates your application, which means when somebody has gone through it and accepted it as complete, and if one document is missing or a plan is at the wrong scale or the ownership certificate hasn't been signed or the fee is a few pounds out, the whole thing comes back as invalid.

You haven't been refused. You haven't been considered at all. And the two or three weeks between submitting and resubmitting have simply gone, along with whatever you'd optimistically told your builder about start dates.

Every council publishes what's called a local list setting out exactly what it wants submitted with each type of application. The national requirements are identical everywhere but the local lists absolutely are not, and knowing what a particular authority asks for is a fair chunk of what you're paying somebody to know. It's also the main reason we'd rather submit on your behalf than hand you a set of drawings and wish you luck with the portal.

Eight weeks from validation for most householder applications, and thirteen weeks for larger or more complex schemes.

Those are targets rather than promises, though most councils hit them most of the time. A busy department, an awkward site or a pile of objections can push it out, and rather than refuse an application simply because the clock ran out, the council will often ask you to agree an extension of time instead. Agreeing is nearly always the right call, because a refusal issued to meet a deadline does nobody any good and you'd only be putting the same thing back in again a month later.

Inside that period there's a consultation stage lasting around three weeks, when your immediate neighbours get written to, a site notice may go up outside, and the application appears on the council's website where anybody at all can read it and comment on it. The council will also consult statutory bodies where they're relevant, which usually means the local highways department, sometimes the Environment Agency, and around here quite often the Coal Authority.

No, and this causes more sleepless nights than anything else in the process, so it's worth being clear about how it actually works.

Planning decisions are made on planning grounds, which are formally called material considerations, and the list includes overlooking and loss of privacy, loss of light and overshadowing, parking, highway safety, traffic, noise, the effect on a listed building or a Conservation Area, the layout and density of what's proposed, its design and materials, government policy, the policies in the council's own local plan, and previous planning decisions on comparable sites.

A neighbour who objects because they don't much like the idea, or because they're worried about what it does to their own house price, or because of a fifteen year disagreement about a boundary hedge, is not raising a material consideration. The officer has to log the objection but it carries very little weight indeed.

What does carry weight is a well founded objection on a genuine planning point. Somebody saying that your proposed first floor window looks straight into their bedroom is making a proper planning argument, and the officer has to deal with it one way or the other.

Which is exactly why a decent design should have answered that before the application ever went in. A window positioned so it doesn't overlook, or obscure glazed, or a roof pitched so it doesn't overshadow, takes the objection away before anybody gets the chance to make it. That's the practical difference between designing for the site in front of you and drawing what somebody asked for and hoping for the best.

Most householder applications never go anywhere near an elected councillor. A planning officer decides them under what are called delegated powers, so they visit the site, write a report, and issue the decision, and nobody votes on anything.

Larger schemes, and applications that pull in a lot of objection, can be called in to the planning committee where councillors vote on them. That takes longer and it's a good deal less predictable, because you're no longer dealing purely with policy. If yours does end up at committee then you or your agent get the chance to speak, but you're normally limited to three minutes, so it needs to be the right three minutes rather than everything you'd like to say.

Nationally something in the region of three quarters of all planning applications are granted, and householder applications do rather better than that. The odds are considerably more in your favour than the horror stories going round would suggest.

Design around the constraints from the beginning, because it's far easier and a great deal cheaper to design something that works with your site than to spend three months arguing about something that doesn't.

Talk to your neighbours before the council's letters land, and this is the most useful sentence in the article. A letter from the planning department arriving with no warning turns somebody who would have said nothing at all into somebody who objects, because it feels like something is being done to them behind their back and their first instinct is to push back. Five minutes over the fence with a drawing in your hand usually sorts the whole thing out before it's a thing at all.

Submit it complete. Half the delays we see are validation problems rather than planning problems, and every one of them was avoidable.

And be realistic about scale. An extension that dominates the original house, or fills the plot, or swallows the whole garden, attracts objections and refusals, and there is nearly always a version that gets you most of what you actually wanted and goes through without a fight. That's the one we'd rather draw for you.

It happens, and very often it isn't the end of the project at all.

A refusal comes with reasons attached, and those reasons tell you precisely what needs to change, which is more useful information than you get from an approval. Frequently a revised application dealing with those specific points is the quickest route back in, and if you resubmit on the same site within twelve months there's normally no fee for the second attempt. That's a deliberate feature of the system rather than a loophole, and it exists because the council would genuinely rather you fixed the problem than took them to appeal.

You can also withdraw an application at any point before the decision if it becomes obvious it's heading for a refusal, and then resubmit free of charge once you've dealt with whatever the problem was. Sometimes that's a better outcome than collecting a refusal you'll be explaining to a buyer's solicitor in ten years' time.

The other route is an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate, and for householder applications you've got twelve weeks from the date of the decision, or six months for most other types. Appeals do succeed, and a meaningful proportion of refused householder applications are granted on appeal, but they take months and the Inspector is looking at the same policies the council looked at. So it's worth being genuinely sure that appealing is better than revising and going again, rather than appealing because you're annoyed.

We've taken on schemes that had already been refused under somebody else and got them through on resubmission. So if you've had a refusal, don't be embarrassed about it and don't start again from nothing, because the decision notice you're holding tells us more about what will and won't work on your site than anything else could.

Not quite yet, and this last bit trips a lot of people up.

Permission normally lasts three years and you have to have started within that time rather than finished, and starting means genuinely starting, digging foundations, not turning over a bit of soil to keep the permission alive, because councils have seen that particular trick before.

Most permissions come with conditions attached, and some of those are pre-commencement conditions which have to be formally discharged before you begin. Materials to be agreed, landscaping schemes, drainage details, occasionally archaeology or ecology. Building without discharging a pre-commencement condition can make your development unlawful even though the permission is sitting there in your hand, and there's no right of appeal against a breach of condition notice, which makes it one of the worse ways to trip up.

If you want to change something after permission is granted, minor alterations can go through as a non-material amendment, which is a light touch application and quick. Anything significant means going back for a fresh permission or a formal variation of the existing one.

And you'll still need Building Regulations approval on top of all this, which is a completely different set of drawings answering a completely different set of rules, because your builder cannot work from planning drawings. There simply isn't enough information in them.

We handle the lot. Survey, drawings, the application itself, dealing with the council and the case officer, discharging the conditions afterwards, and then the Building Regulation drawings your builder actually prices and builds from.

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