The Planning Permission Process in the UK, Stage by Stage
The planning permission process in the UK is the statutory route, set out under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, by which a local council decides whether a proposed building project can go ahead. It runs through five broad stages: pre-application advice, preparing and submitting drawings, validation, statutory consultation, and the officer's decision, with a right of appeal to the Planning Inspectorate if refused. For a typical householder application — an extension, loft conversion, or new dwelling — the statutory determination period is eight weeks from the date the application is validated; larger developments are given thirteen weeks. Most refusals in London boroughs trace back to two things: drawings that misrepresent scale or overlook design guidance in a conservation area, and a failure to engage with planning officers before submission.
Understanding each stage in advance, and where the real risk sits, is what separates a smooth eight-week approval from a stalled application dragging into a formal appeal.
How long does the process actually take?
Eight weeks is the statutory target for a householder application and 42 days for larger-extension prior approval. Across London, 34.5% of applications ran on an agreed extension of time, so the published in-time figures and the real calendar are not the same thing.
| Stage | Statutory period | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Householder application | 8 weeks | £548 |
| Larger home extension prior approval | 42 days | £249 |
| Lawful development certificate | 8 weeks | £274 |
| Full application, one new dwelling | 8 weeks, 13 if major | £610 |
| Neighbour consultation, prior approval | 21 days | — |
| Free resubmission after a decision | once within 12 months | no fee |
| London applications with an agreed extension | 34.5% | — |
Sources: the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015; the General Permitted Development (England) Order 2015, Schedule 2, Part 1, Class A paragraph A.4; the Fees for Applications Regulations 2012 as amended, 2026 rates; MHCLG PS1 and PS2, twelve quarters to March 2026. Read at 1 September 2026.
What Are the Stages of a Planning Application?
Every planning application submitted to a London borough council follows the same statutory skeleton, whether it is going to Camden, Croydon, or Richmond upon Thames. The stages are:
- Pre-application advice — an optional but strongly recommended paid service most councils offer, where a duty planning officer gives informal written feedback on a scheme before it is submitted.
- Drawing preparation — existing and proposed plans, elevations, and sections are produced to the scale and format the council requires.
- Submission via the Planning Portal — the application form, drawings, supporting statements, and fee are lodged, usually through the national Planning Portal, which forwards the package to the relevant council.
- Validation — the council checks the application contains everything the local validation checklist demands. An incomplete application is not validated and the statutory clock does not start.
- Statutory consultation — neighbours, parish or ward councillors, and statutory consultees (highways, conservation, trees) are given 21 days to comment.
- Case officer assessment and site visit — the assigned officer weighs the scheme against the local plan, the National Planning Policy Framework, and any supplementary design guidance.
- Decision — approval (often with conditions), refusal, or, for some minor applications, delegated approval without committee debate.
- Appeal — if refused, the applicant can appeal to the Planning Inspectorate within the statutory window.
A chartered architectural technologist who works through this sequence daily will typically anticipate objections at the drawing stage rather than discover them after refusal.
How Long Does Planning Permission Take to Get?
The statutory determination period is eight weeks from validation for householder applications (extensions, loft conversions, outbuildings) and thirteen weeks for major developments or those requiring an Environmental Impact Assessment screening. In practice, councils under resourcing pressure — several inner London boroughs among them — routinely ask applicants to agree an extension of time rather than issue a refusal purely on the clock. That agreement is voluntary but common, and refusing to grant it simply forces the council toward a refusal decision it might otherwise have avoided.
The eight-week period only starts once the application is validated, not on the day it is submitted. Validation can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on the borough's current caseload and how complete the drawing set is. This is why an invalid or incomplete submission is the single most common cause of unexpected delay: it silently resets the clock before assessment has even begun.
What Happens During Validation?
Validation is an administrative, not a planning-judgement, check. A validation officer works through the council's local validation checklist — published on every borough's planning pages — confirming the application includes, at minimum: a completed application form, the correct fee, a 1:1250 scale location plan with the application site edged in red and any adjoining land in the applicant's ownership edged blue, a 1:500 (or 1:200 for larger sites) scale site plan, existing and proposed plans, elevations and sections at 1:50 or 1:100, and a design and access statement where the council requires one.
If any required drawing is missing, drawn to the wrong scale, or the red line boundary does not match the title plan, the application is returned as invalid. This is entirely avoidable with a properly prepared drawing set, not just a generic list, matter more than they might seem to.
Who Gets Consulted, and Can Neighbours Object?
Once validated, most councils run a 21-day statutory consultation period. Immediate neighbours are notified by letter, a site notice may be posted, and the application appears on the council's public planning register for anyone to view and comment on. Statutory consultees relevant to the specific scheme — highways, the council's conservation and design team, the Environment Agency for flood-zone sites, tree officers where protected trees are nearby — are also invited to respond within that window.
Neighbour objections do not have a formal veto, but they can raise material planning considerations — loss of light, loss of privacy, overbearing bulk — that a case officer is obliged to weigh. Objections on non-material grounds, such as a general dislike of the design or concerns about property value, carry little formal weight, though a large volume of them can still influence how cautiously an officer, or a planning committee, approaches the decision.
How Does the Council Decide?
Most householder and minor commercial applications are decided under delegated authority: a single case officer assesses the scheme against the borough's adopted local plan policies, the National Planning Policy Framework, and any supplementary planning documents — such as Kensington and Chelsea's Basement SPD, which sets tight limits on basement excavation depth and garden coverage, or Westminster's conservation area design guidance, which covers the majority of the borough given its unusually dense concentration of conservation areas. A minority of larger or more contentious applications go to planning committee, where local ward councillors vote after hearing officer recommendations and, often, public speakers.
The decision notice, when issued, is either an unconditional approval, an approval subject to conditions (materials to be agreed, hours of construction, obscure glazing to a side window), or a refusal with stated reasons. Conditions are legally binding and must be discharged, sometimes via a separate application, before or during construction.
What Are the Most Common Reasons for Refusal?
In our experience preparing drawing packages across the 33 London boroughs, refusals cluster around a small number of recurring issues:
| Refusal reason | What typically triggers it |
|---|---|
| Overdevelopment / bulk | Extension depth, height, or massing exceeds what the borough's design guidance considers proportionate to the host property and street |
| Loss of light or outlook to neighbours | Side or rear extensions breaching the '45-degree' or '25-degree' code often used informally by officers to assess daylight impact |
| Harm to conservation area character | Materials, roof form, or window proportions that conflict with a conservation area appraisal, common in Westminster, Camden, and Richmond upon Thames |
| Basement impact | Structural, drainage, or water-table concerns under policies like Kensington and Chelsea's Basement SPD, or Camden's and Islington's own basement development policies |
| Inadequate or misleading drawings | Plans that misstate existing floor levels, boundary lines, or neighbouring windows, undermining officer confidence in the whole application |
Notice that the last row is the one entirely within an applicant's control before submission. Accurate, properly scaled drawings prepared by someone who understands how a specific borough's officers read a plan is a large part of why a chartered technologist's package achieves a 98% first-time approval rate across the practice's projects.
Can You Appeal a Planning Refusal?
Yes. A householder has six months from the date of the refusal notice to lodge an appeal with the Planning Inspectorate, an executive agency of central government independent of the local council. Most householder appeals are decided on the written representations procedure, where an inspector reviews the original application, the council's reasons for refusal, and written submissions from both sides, then visits the site before issuing a decision, usually within around eight to ten weeks of the appeal starting, though this varies with the Inspectorate's caseload.
An appeal is not a fresh application: the inspector considers only whether the council's original refusal was the correct planning judgement on the scheme as submitted. If the drawings or design themselves were the problem, appealing rarely succeeds; revising the scheme and resubmitting, informed by the refusal reasons, is usually the faster and more reliable route back to approval.
How Much Does a Planning Application Cost to Submit?
Alongside the professional fee for preparing drawings, every planning application carries a statutory application fee set out in the Planning Portal fee schedule, which is reviewed periodically by central government and applied uniformly by every council in England. Householder applications for extensions, loft conversions, and outbuildings sit at the lower end of that schedule; full applications for new dwellings or change of use are charged at a higher rate, often calculated per additional dwelling proposed. A Lawful Development Certificate application, whether for an existing use or a proposed permitted development scheme, is charged separately and is typically around half the equivalent full planning fee.
It is worth budgeting for the possibility of a second round of fees if an application is refused and needs to be resubmitted with amendments; most councils, however, allow one free resubmission within twelve months of a refusal or withdrawal, provided the amended scheme is broadly the same development. A chartered architectural technologist preparing the original submission will factor this resubmission window into the overall project timeline from the outset.
What Is Pre-Application Advice and Is It Worth Paying For?
Pre-application advice is a paid, optional service most London boroughs offer, in which a duty planning officer reviews an outline scheme, usually from sketch drawings rather than a full application set, and gives written or verbal feedback on its likely acceptability before formal submission. Fees vary by council and by the scale of the project, from a modest charge for a householder scheme up to several hundred pounds for larger developments.
For anything beyond a straightforward permitted development scheme — a basement in Kensington and Chelsea, a rear extension in a Camden conservation area, a change of use application in Southwark or Lambeth — pre-application advice is usually worth the fee. It surfaces the officer's likely concerns while the scheme can still be redesigned cheaply, rather than after a full application fee and drawing cost have already been spent. It does not bind the council to a particular decision, but officers are generally consistent between pre-application advice and the eventual formal assessment, provided the submitted scheme matches what was discussed.
Do You Need Planning Permission at All?
Not every project needs full planning permission. The General Permitted Development Order 2015 grants automatic planning consent, subject to conditions and limits, for many common householder projects — certain rear extensions, loft conversions, and outbuildings among them — under Schedule 2, Part 1. Where a project falls within those limits, an applicant can apply for a Lawful Development Certificate under section 192 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, which is not planning permission but a formal confirmation that the works are lawful without it, useful for mortgage lenders, solicitors, and future buyers.
Permitted development rights can be removed by an Article 4 Direction, which a council can apply under section 4 of the 1990 Act to withdraw specific permitted development rights across a defined area, usually to protect conservation area character. They do not apply to flats or maisonettes, and listed buildings need separate listed building consent for most alterations regardless of size. A chartered architectural technologist will check permitted development eligibility, Article 4 status, and listing status for the specific address before recommending which route — full application or certificate — is appropriate.
Frequently asked questions
How long does planning permission take in London?
For a standard householder application — an extension or loft conversion — the statutory period is eight weeks from validation. Major applications are given thirteen weeks. Councils under caseload pressure often ask applicants to agree a short extension of time rather than force a refusal on the clock, so real-world timelines can run slightly longer.
What is the difference between validation and submission?
Submission is simply lodging the application and drawings with the council, typically through the Planning Portal. Validation is the council's administrative check that everything on its local checklist — correct scales, red line plan, fee, supporting statements — is present. The statutory eight or thirteen-week clock only starts once the application is validated, not on the day it is submitted.
Can I object to a neighbour's planning application?
Yes, during the 21-day statutory consultation period, comments can be submitted through the council's public planning register. Material planning considerations, such as loss of light, loss of privacy, or overbearing scale, carry weight with the case officer; matters like disliking the design aesthetically or general property-value concerns are not material considerations, though officers will still record them.
What happens if my planning application is refused?
You can revise and resubmit an amended scheme addressing the stated reasons for refusal, usually the faster route, or appeal to the Planning Inspectorate within six months for a householder refusal. Most householder appeals proceed on written representations, with an inspector visiting the site before issuing a decision.
Do I need planning permission for a loft conversion?
Often not. Many loft conversions fall within permitted development rights under the GPDO 2015 Schedule 2 Part 1, subject to volume and design limits, provided the property is a house rather than a flat, has no relevant Article 4 Direction removing those rights, and is not listed. A Lawful Development Certificate can formally confirm this before you build.
What is a Design and Access Statement?
A Design and Access Statement is a supporting document, required by many councils for larger or more sensitive applications, explaining the design principles behind a scheme and how it addresses access for all users. It is not required for every householder application, but the local validation checklist for the specific borough will confirm whether one is needed.
Who decides a planning application, the council or a committee?
Most householder and minor applications are decided under delegated authority by a single case officer against the local plan and national policy. Larger, more contentious, or policy-departing schemes are referred to a planning committee of elected ward councillors, who vote after hearing the officer's recommendation and any public speakers.
