Why has my planning permission been rejected? Reasons and what to do next

Planning · Consents

The reasons councils refuse planning permission for house extensions, how to read your decision notice, and what to do next: revise and resubmit, or appeal within 12 weeks.

Last updated: 2 November 2026 · Reviewed by Graham Sproul RIBA, Design & Operations Director

This guide is general information about the planning system in England. Every council has its own local plan and every site is different, so read your own decision notice closely.

What reasons can planning permission be refused for?

A council can only refuse planning permission for planning reasons, which planners call material considerations. Each reason on a refusal has to point to a policy in the local plan, the London Plan in the capital, or the National Planning Policy Framework. For a house extension, the reasons fall into a handful of groups.

Reason	What the council looks at	Typical example
Design and character	Scale, roof form, materials and how the extension sits with the original house and the street	A flat-roofed first-floor extension on a house with pitched roofs
Neighbour amenity	Loss of daylight or sunlight, an overbearing outlook, overlooking and loss of privacy	A deep two-storey extension close to a neighbour’s rear window
Heritage	Harm to a listed building or to the character of a conservation area	Replacing timber sash windows with uPVC in a conservation area
Insufficient information	Whether the council has the reports it needs to judge the impact	Air conditioning units with no acoustic report
Trees	Harm to protected trees and their roots	Foundations inside the root area of a tree with a preservation order
Highways and parking	Loss of off-street parking, visibility and safe access	Converting a garage on a street with parking pressure
Flood risk	Building in a flood zone without a flood risk assessment	A basement or ground-floor bedroom on a site at risk of flooding

Neighbours’ objections count only where they raise planning matters. A letter saying an extension will block light to a kitchen window is a planning point. Building noise and boundary questions fall under other laws, such as the Party Wall Act process.

Why would planning permission be refused? Reading your decision notice

The decision notice is the document to start from after a refusal. It gives the application reference, the date of the decision and a numbered list of reasons, each naming the policies the council says the scheme conflicts with. Many councils also publish the planning officer’s delegated report on the planning register, and it explains the reasoning in more detail than the notice.

Read the reasons as a brief. A reason about roof form asks for a different roof, and the extension may not need to shrink at all. Where the council says information is missing, it wants a report, and the design may be fine once that’s in. A neighbour’s light needs drawings that test it, so you can show the council where the extension stops affecting the window.

Check the notice for a reference to permitted development as well. Some houses have had their permitted development rights removed by a condition on an earlier permission, often when the house was built or last extended. That changes which route your project can take, and our guide to planning permission vs permitted development explains how the routes differ.

What refusals on our own files show

Refusals are uncommon, but they happen. Here are two from recent AURA applications in London boroughs, with the council’s reasons in summary, and a certificate granted on one of the same projects.

Application	What was proposed	Reason on the notice	The lesson
A recent AURA application in a London borough	A single-storey rear extension and two first-floor rear extensions	The flat roofs of the two first-floor parts were judged out of keeping with the original house, and too prominent	First-floor extensions are judged on roof form and how they read from neighbouring gardens. Test the roof against the original house early.
A recent AURA application in another London borough	Air conditioning units at a house	Not enough information, in particular no formal acoustic assessment	Plant such as air conditioning or heat pump units needs a noise report with the application.
The first project again (granted)	A lawful development certificate for a garden outbuilding on the same site	Granted under permitted development (Class E)	Part of a project can often go ahead on a different route while the rest is redesigned.

Neither refusal questioned whether the owners could extend at all. Each was about one part of the scheme, and the notice said which part the council couldn’t accept.

Planning permission refused: what next?

If your planning permission has been rejected, you have two main routes. You can change the scheme and apply again, or you can appeal to the Planning Inspectorate and ask an inspector to decide the application as it stands. Some owners do both: they appeal and submit a revised scheme in parallel, so one route is moving while the other is decided.

Option	When it suits	Time limit	Cost to apply
Revise and resubmit	The reasons point to a specific part of the design that you can change	A fee-free resubmission must be made within 12 months of the refusal	Usually no fee for one resubmission of the same character on the same site
Householder appeal	You believe the scheme meets policy and the council’s reasons are wrong	Must reach the Planning Inspectorate within 12 weeks of the decision date	No planning fee to the council
Lawful development certificate	A smaller version of the project falls within permitted development	None, as long as permitted development rights apply to the house	£274 (proposed use or development)
Change the project	The reasons can’t be met without losing what you wanted from the extension	None	A full new fee if the scheme is no longer of the same character: £548 for a householder application today

The fee rule comes from the government’s Chief Planner’s letter of 14 November 2023. The repeat-application “free go” after an approval was removed from 6 December 2023, but the letter says “an applicant will still be able to benefit from a free-go if their application was withdrawn or refused” in the preceding 12 months, subject to the other conditions. In practice that means the same applicant, the same site and a scheme of the same character or description.

A revised application goes through validation and a decision period again, so allow the same time as a first application. Our guide on how long planning permission takes sets out the stages.

How a householder appeal works

You appeal to the Planning Inspectorate online. For a householder appeal, the Planning Portal says the appeal “has to be received by the Planning Inspectorate within 12 weeks of the date of the decision”, and that you lose the right of appeal if you miss it. An inspector reads the papers, visits the site and issues a written decision. The inspector can allow the appeal, which grants permission, or dismiss it, and the decision letter explains why.

An appeal decides the scheme you submitted, so if the drawings need to change, a resubmission is usually the faster route to a permission you can build.

Worked example: the dates after a refusal

Say your householder application was refused on 2 November 2026. Here is how the deadlines fall.

Step	Rule	Arithmetic	Deadline
Householder appeal	12 weeks from the decision date	12 × 7 = 84 days. 28 days to 30 November, 31 in December, 25 in January: 28 + 31 + 25 = 84	25 January 2027
Fee-free resubmission	Within 12 months of the refusal	2 November 2026 + 12 months	2 November 2027
Fees for the refusal plus one resubmission, at today’s rate	Householder fee £548 from 1 April 2026; free-go on the resubmission	£548 + £0 = £548, against £548 + £548 = £1,096 without the free-go. £1,096 − £548 = £548	£548 saved

The appeal window is the one people miss. Twelve weeks feels long, but a daylight study or an acoustic report can take weeks to commission, so decide the route in the first fortnight. The fee itself is due to change: a new national fee schedule is proposed from around 8 December 2026, subject to Parliament, which would take the householder fee to about £575.

How to reduce the risk of a refusal next time

Much of the work that keeps an application from being refused happens before the drawings are drawn. Our process starts with a desktop study of the site’s constraints and the local planning rules for the house, and then up to three concepts in sketch form, so the design is tested against the planning position before a full drawing set is produced.

The checks that catch refusal reasons early are these:

• The planning history of the house, including conditions on earlier permissions and whether permitted development rights still apply.
• Whether the house is listed or in a conservation area, and whether any trees on or near the site are protected.
• The council’s design guidance for extensions, which often sets out the roof forms and depths it expects.
• Which reports the council needs with the application, such as a heritage statement, a noise report for plant or a tree report.

Heritage is its own subject: if your house is listed, our guide to renovating a listed building covers listed building consent. If you’d like an architect to prepare and manage the application, our planning service page explains how we work.

Before you build: refusal and enforcement

A refusal means the work can’t go ahead as applied for. Building it anyway is a breach of planning control, and the council can take enforcement action, which can include requiring the work to be removed. If you’ve already started, stop and take advice before you do anything else.

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