Planning application drawings drawn to be approved, not just submitted

A householder application needs existing and proposed floor plans and elevations, a site or block plan, and a location plan at 1:1250 with the site edged red. Sections are required wherever roof form, floor levels or ground levels change, and always for a loft conversion. Every drawing must carry a stated metric scale, and plans need a north point. Some councils additionally ask for a design and access statement or, on a heritage site, a heritage statement.

The statutory period for a householder application is eight weeks from validation. The crucial word is validation: the clock starts when the council accepts the application as complete, not when you submit it, so a pack missing a required drawing can lose weeks before it formally begins. Councils also vary in how often they ask applicants to agree a longer period — some agree extensions on well over half their caseload, others on barely one per cent.

London councils granted 85.6% of the householder applications they decided in the 2025-26 financial year — 21,185 of 24,758 — against 90.3% across England as a whole. The spread between boroughs is much wider than that gap suggests: Hammersmith and Fulham granted 98.6% while Barking and Dagenham granted 68.0%. The figures come from the MHCLG statistics every English council reports quarterly.

Most refusals cite loss of amenity to a neighbour, harm to the character of a conservation area, or overdevelopment of the plot. Very few turn on the quality of the drawings themselves. What drawings determine is whether the officer can assess those questions at all: a section that omits the neighbouring boundary, or elevations without annotated materials, leave the officer with an open question that costs weeks to resolve or gets resolved against you.

There is no legal requirement to use a professional. In practice councils validate against a published list, and the drawings must be to a stated scale, dimensionally accurate and consistent between plan, elevation and section. Hand sketches and estate agents' floor plans are routinely rejected at validation. The other risk is measurement: permitted development allowances run from the original building, and getting that baseline wrong can invalidate the whole application.

Planning drawings show what the building will look like and how it sits in its surroundings — they answer whether the development is acceptable in principle. Building regulations drawings show how it will be built: structure, insulation, ventilation, fire separation, drainage and thermal performance. Planning permission and building regulations approval are separate consents from separate departments, and having one does not give you the other. Most projects need both.

Often not. On a house, a single-storey rear extension is permitted development if it projects no more than 3m from the original rear wall on a semi-detached or terraced property, or 4m on a detached one, stays within 4m in height, and uses materials similar to the existing house. Beyond those depths, up to 6m or 8m, prior approval is required instead of full permission. Flats have no permitted development rights, and conservation areas and Article 4 directions restrict them on houses.

It is the council's formal written confirmation that your project is permitted development and needs no planning permission. It is optional, but worth obtaining: it settles the question before you build rather than after, and a buyer's solicitor will ask for it when you come to sell. It is determined on a narrower basis than a planning application — the council decides whether the work is lawful, not whether it likes it — which makes it a more predictable route where the project genuinely qualifies.

All 33, plus the neighbouring counties of Surrey, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. Every borough decides against its own local plan and publishes its own validation list, and the differences are real: approval rates across London ranged from 68.0% to 98.6% last year. We prepare each pack to the specific council's requirements rather than to a generic template.

You have two routes. A revised application addressing the stated reason for refusal is free to submit within twelve months of the original decision on the same site, and it is usually faster. An appeal to the Planning Inspectorate takes several months and is judged against the same policies the council applied — nationally 34.4% of householder appeals succeed, though the rate varies widely by borough. Which route is better depends entirely on whether the reason given is something a redesign can answer.