How to understand whether your project qualifies for Permitted Development and if you are able to use this planning route

SIMON RIX Is a professional planning consultant and runs Planix.UK Planning Consultants Ltd.

Asa planning consultant, my first task is to advise my clients on the easiest way to achieve their goals. Usually, that means first looking to see if they can use the Permitted Development (PD) route for their project. You may not know it, but PD rights are not universal across the whole country. There are geographical areas where some of them are limited and others don’t apply at all. The rules covering Permitted Development are many and varied, but in this article I’m going to focus on the issue of those geographical areas where there are exclusions and limitations to Permitted Development rights.

THE EXCLUSION SYSTEM

Permitted Development is a national system of rules that defines certain circumstances where planning consent has been deemed to have already been given, automatically. If a project meets the requirements, then no planning application is needed, although for some PD projects, a type of halfway-house application, called a ‘prior approval’, will need to be submitted to the council.

Whether you think your project is covered by Permitted Development or whether you think you need prior approval or not, the first thing to do is to figure out if your site is in one of the geographical areas where Permitted Development rights are different. These are: National Parks, the Broads, National Landscapes (formerly known as AONBs), Conservation Areas, land within World Heritage Sites, ‘Article 4’ areas and sites of special scientific interest.