Unhappy with your planning decision? Should you appeal or tweak and resubmit?

It's obviously better to get your planning application through first-time, but if you don't get the result you want, what should you do?

Thanks to our detailed research, careful preparation and influencer engagement, most of our planning applications do get through first-time. But if you have had a refusal or a condition imposed that you think is unfair, you'll need to decide what to do next.

Sometimes an appeal is the best course of action - we are working on a number for clients right now. Whilst there are no submission fees involved, there will be the costs of researching and preparing your case and liaising with the national Planning Inspectorate who decide on planning appeals. And they can take a long time - often six months or more. So it might be that a relatively small change to the details of an application would result in the decision you want, and quicker. If started in time there are no additional submission fees involved, and a resubmission should take about two months for your local council to decide.

We took this route for one of our clients after their initial planning application for a barn conversion (prepared by their previous planning consultant) had a condition imposed that would have required the upstairs windows to have been made of opaque glass and fixed closed. This was to prevent the potential overlooking of a neighbour's garden but it seemed a shame because some beautiful views over open countryside would have been lost. The applicant asked us to consider an appeal against the condition, but since he wanted to start building work as soon as possible, we talked with the local council planning officers for him and got them to agree that our planned redesign of the internal layout would be enough to remove the need for the opaque glass and the fixed closed windows. The result was a successful resubmission and a very happy client.

If you'd like advice on what to do about an unhelpful planning decision that you've received, you can contact Planix.uk via simon@planix.uk or call on 07801 356 840 or 0845 170 8050.