Planning permission asks whether your building should be there. Building regulations ask whether it is safe, healthy and efficient once it is. They are separate systems, administered by different people, applied for separately, paid for separately, and enforced in different ways.
Having one does not give you the other. Not needing one does not mean you do not need the other. This is the most common and most expensive misunderstanding in domestic construction, and it usually surfaces years later, when someone tries to sell the house.
The short version
| Planning permission | Building regulations | |
|---|---|---|
| The question | Is this acceptable in this place? | Is this built safely and properly? |
| Who decides | The local planning authority | The council's building control service, or a private registered building control approver |
| Judged on | Local plan policies, national policy, appearance, neighbour amenity, highways, heritage, ecology, flood risk | Technical standards for structure, fire, drainage, ventilation, energy, safety and access |
| Discretionary? | Yes — it is a judgement | No — it is a compliance test |
| Public consultation | Yes, neighbours are notified | No |
| Fee paid to | The local authority, directly by you | Building control body |
| Evidence you have it | Decision notice, plus conditions | Completion certificate |
| If you get it wrong | Enforcement action, potentially requiring removal | Unsafe building, no completion certificate, problems at sale |
What planning permission actually assesses
Planning is about land use and the effect of a development on its surroundings. An application is judged against the development plan for the area — the local plan of your authority, plus any neighbourhood plan — and national policy.
The considerations that decide most householder applications are:
- Design, scale, massing and materials, and their effect on the character of the area
- Effect on neighbours: daylight, overlooking, privacy, and whether the proposal is overbearing
- Heritage: listed buildings, conservation areas, and the setting of both
- Highways, access and parking
- Trees, ecology and protected species
- Flood risk and drainage
Planning is a judgement. Two officers can reasonably reach different views, which is why the argument matters — a design and access statement that explains the reasoning is doing real work, not filling a form.
In Norfolk the authority you deal with matters. South Norfolk, Broadland, Norwich City, North Norfolk, Great Yarmouth, Breckland and King's Lynn and West Norfolk each have their own local plan, and the Broads Authority is a separate planning authority with its own plan and its own priorities. The same scheme is not judged identically across a district boundary.
And some work needs no permission at all. Permitted development rights allow certain works without an application. Those rights are narrower than most people assume, they have been amended more than once in recent years, and they can be removed entirely by conservation area status, listed status, an Article 4 direction, or a condition on the original permission for a modern estate. Whether they apply to your property has to be checked for that property.
What building regulations actually assess
Building regulations are a set of technical standards that apply to the work itself. They exist to make buildings safe, healthy, efficient and accessible, and they apply regardless of whether planning permission was needed.
They cover, among other things, structural stability, fire safety and means of escape, resistance to moisture, ventilation, drainage and waste, energy efficiency, overheating, sound insulation, glazing safety, stairs and protection from falling, and electrical safety.
There is no judgement involved. Either the work complies or it does not.
Two routes exist for domestic work:
- Full plans. Drawings and calculations are submitted and checked before work begins, and you get a written response. Slower at the start, but you know your details are accepted before anyone builds them.
- Building notice. Notice is given and the work is inspected as it proceeds. Faster to start, but any problem is discovered on site, in the fabric, when it is expensive to correct.
For anything structurally or technically involved, we would normally recommend full plans. Discovering a beam is undersized on paper costs a revision. Discovering it after the floor is on costs considerably more.
An inspection regime follows, at defined stages — foundations, damp-proof course, drainage, structure — ending with a final inspection and, if satisfactory, a completion certificate. That certificate is the document that proves compliance. Keep it. Your buyer's solicitor will ask for it.
Which comes first
Almost always planning, then building regulations.
There is little sense in producing full construction information for a scheme that may have to change to get consent. The sequence we work to is that the design is resolved and submitted for planning at RIBA Stage 3, Spatial Coordination, and the technical information — construction details, structural design, services, and the building control submission — is produced at Stage 4, Technical Design.
The exception is where a technical constraint could change the design fundamentally: a scheme that depends on a particular structural solution, a drainage route that may not exist, or a fire escape strategy in a loft conversion. Those need testing early enough to inform the planning submission, because a scheme that gets consent and then cannot be built is worse than no consent at all.
Note also that planning approval takes time. For smaller applications approval may take 8 to 10 weeks, for larger applications 13 to 15 weeks, and it is sometimes delayed. That period starts when the authority validates the application — after the fee has been paid and the required documents are present — not on the day you submit.
The other approvals people forget
Planning and building regulations are the two main ones. They are not the only ones.
Listed building consent is a third, separate consent, required for works affecting the character of a listed building — including internal works, and including works to structures within the curtilage. Carrying out unauthorised works to a listed building is a criminal offence, not a fee to be regularised later. If your building is listed, this is the one to establish first.
The Party Wall etc. Act 1996 is not a planning or building control matter at all. It is a separate civil process governing work to shared walls, work close to a neighbour's foundations, and excavation near their building. It requires notice to the adjoining owner and, where consent is not given, an award prepared by surveyors. It has its own timescales, and starting work without serving notice is a route to an injunction.
Drainage approvals. Building near or over a public sewer requires agreement with the water and sewerage undertaker — in most of Norfolk, Anglian Water. This is a separate consent with its own process, and it is a common cause of delay on rear extensions.
Highways. A new or altered access onto a public road involves the highway authority, which in this county is Norfolk County Council.
Planning conditions. A permission almost always comes with conditions, and some are pre-commencement — materials, ecology, drainage, construction management. Those must be formally discharged by application before work starts. A consent with undischarged pre-commencement conditions is not a consent you can build on, and this catches people out regularly.
Community Infrastructure Levy, where the authority charges it, with its own forms and its own consequences for missing them.
What happens when it goes wrong
No planning permission. The authority can serve an enforcement notice requiring the work to be altered or removed. There are time limits after which enforcement is no longer available, and they differ depending on the type of breach and have themselves changed, so do not rely on a remembered figure. Meanwhile the building is unauthorised, which affects mortgageability and sale.
No building regulations approval. No completion certificate. At sale, a buyer's solicitor will identify the gap, and the transaction will stall while you obtain either a regularisation certificate — which requires opening up work for inspection — or indemnity insurance, which covers the risk of enforcement but does not make the building safe or compliant.
The second of these is far more common than the first, because the work looks finished and nobody notices anything is missing until the house is on the market.
Getting it right from the start
The straightforward way to avoid all of this is to have someone establish, before you spend anything, which consents your project actually needs and in what order.
That is part of what we do at the feasibility stage, and it is covered in our free initial consultation: reviewing site constraints, identifying the planning and technical challenges, and setting out next steps and indicative timelines. Our rear extensions at Cringleford and two-storey rear extension at Stoke Holy Cross are both projects where the planning route and the technical route had to be settled together.
See our planning applications and architectural design services, or book a free initial consultation. Call +44 (0) 1508 830 310 or email info@archidite.com.