Planning consultant in London

What a planning consultant actually produces

The work product is practical. You get a recommended route, whether that is permitted development proved by a Lawful Development Certificate, a prior approval, a householder application or a full application. You get a written planning statement that sets the scheme against the policies the officer will apply.

You also get a validation check. Every council keeps a local list of extra documents, and a missing item makes an application invalid. We read that list against your scheme before anything is submitted.

After submission we speak to the case officer, answer consultee comments and negotiate amendments. The statement and the planning drawings are prepared together, so an officer never meets a text that describes a different building from the sheets.

The national rules a consultant works to

A non-major application has a statutory decision period of 8 weeks; a major one has 13 weeks. Technical details consent, the step after permission in principle, has 5 weeks where it is not major. All three can be extended by written agreement, and none is a promise about any single case.

The council's fee for a householder application to one dwelling is £548 under the current table. We confirm the fee for your project before you pay it, because it varies with the type of development.

Validation is where consultants save time. A council can insist on a local requirement only if it appears on a formally adopted list published less than 2 years before the application is made, so we check the list's date as well as its contents.

Pre-application advice: when it earns its fee

London councils can offer pre-application advice, and they may charge for it. National guidance says these discussions help agree what information is required and reduce validation delay,.

It is worth the cost on a contested site, a heritage setting or a scheme that stretches policy. It adds far less to a modest rear extension that follows the council's published design guidance.

We tell you which case you are in, and if pre-application is sensible we prepare the request, attend the meeting and turn the written reply into design changes.

If the council refuses or does not decide

A refusal is not the end. A householder appeal must be lodged within 12 weeks of the decision notice. Most other planning appeals have a deadline of 6 months from the decision notice (or expiry of the decision period).

The Planning Inspectorate's latest statistics put the median householder written-representations decision at 11.6 weeks, and the all-case median for written representations over the last twelve months at 18 weeks. In the most recent quarter, 31 per cent of section 78 appeals were allowed.

That last figure describes appeals nationally, not your case. Our planning appeals service starts by reading the decision notice and the officer's report and telling you honestly whether an appeal, a revised application or a different route is the better use of your money.

How we quote and run a planning consultant brief

There is no published price list for consultancy, because the work depends on the site. Every job gets a fixed quote after a free constraints check, and the fee does not move once you accept it.

Our process is the same as for drawings. We check the address, agree the route, and an independent chartered technologist, never the person who drew the sheets, checks every document before submission. Amendments requested by the officer are made within five working days, and redrawing is free until approval.

Planning advice by borough

A consultant is only as useful as their knowledge of the local council. Our architectural drawings by area pages set out each borough's conservation areas, Article 4 directions and recent householder decision figures, which is the groundwork for any planning argument.

For a retrospective case, see retrospective planning applications. For the validation documents a council may ask for on a bigger site, our guides to the daylight and sunlight report and the biodiversity net gain plan explain each one.