Daylight and sunlight report in Newham

Small gardens and shared walls

Only 16.9 per cent of the borough's land was domestic garden in the Greater London Authority's land-use survey. Gardens here are compact, so a tall wall or an outbuilding close to a boundary shades a larger proportion of the neighbour's outdoor space than it would in a leafy suburb.

Houses are 47.1 per cent of households, and only 30.8 per cent of households own their home. A large part of the neighbour mailing list for any application is therefore tenants, often in a flat above a shop or in a converted terrace. Their windows face the rear of your plot, and the report must say what happens to each.

The council's Altering and Extending your Home SPD sets out the shapes it will consider for an extension. We model those shapes against the real window positions, so you learn early whether the permitted form also takes too much light.

Heritage and Article 4 in a borough of new development

Newham has only 9 conservation areas, and Historic England lists 125 entries in the borough. For most houses there, heritage will not govern the design, and light becomes the main test an officer applies to a neighbour's objection.

The council holds an Article 4 direction for houses in multiple occupation. If you are splitting a house into several bedsits or flats, the change of use needs consent first, and the daylight to every new room then matters. Rooms with a single small window to a narrow side passage do poorly on average daylight factor, and it is better to know before the layout is fixed.

What Newham householders can expect from the council

The council decided 388 householder applications in the latest published year and granted 86.9 per cent. 97.2 per cent were decided within eight weeks or an agreed extension, so decisions come quickly. That leaves little time to fix a thin submission once it is in.

Smaller schemes of up to nine homes were granted at 78.9 per cent. Our planning drawings in Newham and the report are built from one model, so the two arrive consistent. For anything bigger than a house extension, our planning consultant service in Newham can run the application around the light evidence.

How the work is done

We survey your property and photograph the neighbouring elevations, then model the street as it is. The proposal goes in next. We test the vertical sky component at each affected window, the daylight distribution in the rooms behind, sunlight hours for windows that face within the orientation limit, and overshadowing of gardens and any waterside space.

Each result is explained in plain English. The BRE guide is advisory, and London guidance asks officers to apply it flexibly on denser sites. With an average home selling for 390,349 pounds, a report that explains why a small loss is reasonable carries real weight. A second chartered technologist checks the geometry before we issue.

If a window fails, we try the usual remedies on the model, such as a stepped roof, a lower parapet or a shallower depth, and show you the effect of each.

Cost and next step

The fee is fixed after a free constraints check, because it depends on the neighbouring windows to be tested and the site. Send an address and a sketch.

Read the daylight and sunlight service overview for the method, or the architectural drawings page for Newham for everything else we draw there. Nearby boroughs word their rules differently: see Tower Hamlets and Redbridge.