Planning appeals in Redbridge

Prior approval and certificates dominate

The council granted 46 large-extension prior approvals but refused 93, so roughly twice as many failed as passed. It also handled 812 Lawful Development Certificate applications.

Those figures suggest many households here try permitted development first. When it fails, the appeal looks at a narrow set of questions: whether the extension is as deep as claimed, whether the original house has already been extended, and whether neighbours would be affected. We survey the house as built, so the depth claimed is the depth that is there.

Green Belt on the borough's edge

Green-belt polygons cover 34 per cent of the borough. A refusal there cites disproportionate additions or harm to openness, and the appeal must compare the proposal with the original building, not with the house as it stands today.

We reconstruct that original building from old mapping and earlier permissions and show the volume of each addition. If the sums fall in your favour, the argument is clear. If not, we say so early.

The Housing Design Guide and heritage

Officers apply the Housing Design Guide SPD to extensions and new homes. The borough has 16 conservation areas, 134 listed entries, and where a street has a uniform pattern, refusals for harm to the street scene follow.

We draw the street, mark each neighbour's roof and side gap and show how your proposal sits in the rhythm. Where the pattern is already broken by approved extensions, an inspector can see it at once.

Counting what the house already has

Where a house has been extended before, the arithmetic of allowances is where an application can fail. Permitted development counts from the original house, so a previous rear addition, a garage extension or a porch may already have used some of the allowance.

We rebuild the history of the house from planning records, old plans and aerial images, and mark each addition as original, permitted or unlawful. That sheet is often the most important in the bundle, because it lets us show which additions count and which do not.

If the earlier work has no permission, the picture changes, and we say so. A Lawful Development Certificate for the earlier work may need to come first, and our team can draw that set in the same survey.

With 991 householder decisions in a year, officers see the same extension types often, and a refusal that departs from that pattern stands out. We search the register for matching schemes on the same road, using the application reference and date to build a comparison table.

Where a nearby extension of similar depth was permitted, we show it on the street plan beside yours. An inspector reads consistency as a fair-treatment point, and it can decide a close case.

Timing and the cost of a wrong turn

Redbridge decided 94.7 per cent of householder applications on time, so notices rarely drift. The 12 week limit applies from the notice date, and a prior approval refusal may have a different time limit, so read the notice rather than assume.

The national median for a householder appeal by written representations was 11.6 weeks. Given that more prior approvals fail here than pass, we often recommend a revised application over a long appeal, and we put both options in writing with a fixed fee for each.

Next steps

We write the statement, correct the drawings and have a second technologist check the bundle. Our planning drawings in Redbridge page covers a revised application, our Lawful Development Certificate drawings in Redbridge page covers lawfulness, and the architectural drawings in Redbridge page lists the rest.