The reforms contained in the new procedural guide for planning appeals are extraordinarily short-sighted, and will have a corrosive effect on the planning process for ordinary people across the country. In weakening appeals, councils will be granted a ‘planner’s charter’ to unreasonably and unnecessarily refuse applications with no fear of repercussion. And, rather than ‘streamline’ the planning process, these reforms will likely increase the already unreasonable bureaucratic overhead placed on both applicants and planners alike.
What is being proposed?
From 1st April 2026, the vast majority of applicants will no longer be able to submit any further evidence when appealing a planning decision. Appeals will be decided purely on the documentation and evidence submitted as part of the planning application itself. The applicant will only have the opportunity to fill out a standard form when appealing a decision.
Until now, applicants were able to submit a statement of case, detailing the reasons why they disagree with the planners’ decision, critiquing any reasoning in the officer report, while also submitting further evidence to substantiate their claims. Councils were able to provide further comments on this evidence, with the inspector then issuing a decision taking all these matters into account. This provided a fairly robust quasi-judicial process, where officer reports could be properly scrutinised without the cost and complexity of a judicial review.
But from next month, no evidence or statement of case will be allowed from applicants whatsoever. There will be no opportunity to challenge or even discuss the council’s reasoning in the officer report, nor submit any evidence contradicting the council’s reasoning.
These reforms will not apply to appeals against listed building consent decisions, or appeals against a failure to grant a decision within required timescales. Nor will they apply for major development where hearings or inquiries take place. They will apply in every other ‘domestic’ case – changes of use, householder permissions, and alterations to flats, shops, and offices to name a few. Effectively, these reforms are aimed solely at the ‘ordinary person’.
The government’s rationale is that these changes will ‘streamline’ the planning process, and encourage a culture of ‘submit once, submit right’. It will also apparently eliminate the potential for the appeals process to be used as a ‘bargaining tool’, will ‘keep decisions local’, and reduce unnecessary bureaucracy.
As such, the government is effectively forcing applicants to provide comprehensive evidence and detail during their initial planning application, ‘front-loading’ a complex and costly process which would normally be reserved only for appeal. The intention is that planners will always be presented with the ‘full picture’ at application stage, allowing them to make more robust decisions at the local level.
The role of evidence in the planning system
However, these changes obviously presume that planners will take such evidence into account, assessing it thoroughly and determining an application based on all the evidence submitted in the application. This, unfortunately, is quite a fundamental misconception, and construes something of a disconnect with reality on the part of the government. In a system which has been under-funded for more than a decade, planners simply do not have the time to consider all the evidence submitted by applicants. The best the typical applicant can hope for is for the drawings themselves to be properly assessed and understood. Sadly, even this can be optimistic.
This is not to criticise the competence and experience of planners in general. Even when fully resourced, the planning system is unjustifiably complex and it is rather open-ended as to what evidence should be taken into account and how it should be weighed, while new case law, statute, and policy continuously evolves and sometimes fundamentally alters the existing system. What you know about a particular topic in planning today may be completely altered by a new High Court judgment tomorrow.
In such an academically labyrinthine system, it is natural and indeed inevitable that with insufficient time and resource, planners will develop a ‘shorthand’ for assessing planning applications.
This shorthand mostly relies on experience, intuition, a fairly quick assessment of the application drawings, and a skim read of the design and access statement. Clarifications may be sought from the applicant, or further questions asked during a site visit. A thorough assessment of all the available evidence is not something which is worthwhile or even relevant in the vast majority of cases, and as any architect or consultant knows, important details buried in the fine print of a design and access statement or heritage statement are simply not going to be read. The ability to clearly communicate design intentions through the drawings, and communicate openly with planning officers during the application process is paramount to receiving approval.
In short, we assume planners will approach common proposals with common sense. Only where bespoke or unusual alterations are proposed do we need to argue our case in detail.
The role of the appeal
In this system, the planning appeal acts as a backstop for when the shorthand inevitably fails. Simple disagreements on matters of policy or planning judgment may of course be challenged, but the key function of the appeal at the domestic scale is to provide a reliable remedy where planners are simply ‘wrong’: where clear errors have been made in the interpretation of drawings, the reading of policy, or the understanding of relevant case law. In these scenarios, the only option is to challenge the erroneous decision through judicial review or planning appeal, rather than resubmit the same scheme and simply ‘hope for the best’.
Of course, it is in challenging such erroneous decisions where evidence becomes of critical importance, in needing to ‘prove’ a matter of fact or law, and these challenges arise solely in response to the officer report and decision notice. It is only after the event that such evidence can be prepared and submitted. It is obviously impossible to pre-empt the full range of errors which planners could make prior to a decision being issued.
Only 6% of applications progressed to appeal in 2025. Typically, only a third of appeals are upheld. But even where appeals are dismissed, the detailed consideration of this evidence by the inspector can be a crucial material consideration informing resubmissions, helping to break planning deadlocks. They are one source of reliability in a highly unpredictable and contradictory system.
The corrosive effect of a weakened appeal system
By eliminating the ability to submit further evidence at appeal, the government is removing this important backstop, granting planners something of a charter to rush decisions through and make clear errors in their decisions and reports, with no obvious repercussions for doing so.
Indeed, it is not entirely clear how decisions which are fundamentally erroneous can now be challenged properly, except through judicial review, which seems an unlikely prospect in the vast majority of cases. It is obviously impossible to anticipate every error that a planner might make at the point of submission, while resubmitting the same scheme to be considered by the same planner while pointing out their previous mistakes is unlikely to go down well. It is also fundamentally unfair in these cases to expect applicants to pay for the resubmission, without any right to reclaim costs even if errors are admitted.
But I would argue that the effects of a weakened appeal system are likely to be even more corrosive than this. When refusing an application, the quality of decision-making and the robustness of officer reports is, in part, motivated by the threat of an appeal. Indeed, many local authorities simply rely on the officer report as evidence during an appeal, not submitting any further evidence in response to the appellant’s statement of case. This reflects the relatively high standard of probity in planning as compared to other council functions such as housing or social care, which are somewhat notoriously poor across the country. But with the threat of an appeal removed, or at least significantly reduced, it is not clear what checks exist to prevent the standards of decision-making falling significantly. In other words, planners will now have free rein to refuse most applications with little justification.
Even where planners recognise a risk of appeal, through the tone of the application or otherwise, the new system will be extremely prejudiced towards the local authority. Prior to issuing a refusal, planners will have the opportunity to respond to any and all evidence submitted by the applicant in their officer report, and provide or refer to new evidence and introduce new reasoning they may not have previously raised with the applicant. In including this in the officer report, it will form part of the application documentation and, effectively, be the local authority’s ‘statement of case’. Even when applicants are fully prepared, the planners will always be one step ahead. The appeal process could easily become something of a ‘kangaroo court,’ where, in reality, only the local authority is permitted to submit evidence.
Conclusions
So where does this leave applicants? In short, for all but the simplest of applications, we will be left guessing and ‘war-gaming’ how planners might respond to an application, what sort of mistakes they are likely to make, and somehow try to pre-empt and de-risk these issues. Even relatively simple applications will carry far more risk, and we will always need to consider and include any evidence that might be useful at appeal in the initial submission. All this means to say that the planning process will become even more complex, lengthy, and expensive than it already is.
Of course the government’s intention is that this will provide a strong incentive to iron out uncertainties with the planners at the earliest opportunity, placing more of an emphasis on pre-application discussions and reserving appeals for exceptional cases. This may be a laudable aim, but how exactly this ‘streamlines’ the planning process is entirely unclear. On balance, this simply appears to increase resource pressures on planners, straining an already under-resourced system even further.
Where planners have been unreasonable during pre-application or during the application stage, it is likely that most applications will now head to appeal through the non-determination route instead of waiting for a decision to be issued. In these cases a statement of case can still be submitted, which seems rather counterintuitive. This will create further ambiguity in the planning system, and make decision making less, not more local. It also contributes further to the appeal system being used as a ‘bargaining tool’, necessitating some level of ‘gaming’ of the system to secure proper decision-making.
In conclusion, this seems to be a fundamentally misguided and short-sighted reform to have made, and follows something of a pattern of the government introducing reforms which leave architects, applicants, and consultants guessing at the government’s intentions. In attempting to streamline the 6% of applications which head to appeal, the character of the whole planning system is likely to change, and not for the better. The core issues of uncertainty, poor resource, and over-complexity in the system will remain, and, indeed, likely be significantly exacerbated.
Owen Ward MSc IHBC