Approval of details or discharge of conditions

An application for approval of details reserved by condition and a discharge of conditions application are two names for one procedure, set out in article 27 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015. A reserved matters application is a different animal. It settles matters that an outline permission deliberately left open. Choosing the wrong route costs weeks of programme, and on an outline consent close to its three-year deadline it can cost the permission itself.

The three routes and what councils call them

The naming is inconsistent across England. The Planning Portal form is headed "approval of details reserved by condition", plenty of authorities call the identical submission a discharge of conditions application, and older practices still write "details pursuant" on the covering letter. All three phrases describe the same thing, which is a written decision confirming that the detail you have submitted satisfies the wording of a condition already imposed.

Reserved matters sit apart. An outline permission grants the principle of development and defers one or more of five matters, defined in article 2(1) of the 2015 Order as access, appearance, landscaping, layout and scale. Nothing else can be reserved. A condition purporting to reserve, say, the drainage strategy is not a reserved matter at all, it is an ordinary condition, and it is discharged under article 27.

The third route people reach for by mistake is section 73 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, which varies or removes a condition rather than complying with it. If the detail you want approved differs from what the condition actually requires, article 27 will not rescue you. And section 96A of the same Act deals with non-material amendments to approved drawings, not with conditions.

What each application determines

An officer handling an article 27 request is not reopening the merits of the scheme. The only live question is compliance with the condition as drafted, which is why badly drafted conditions produce so much argument at discharge stage. A reserved matters officer has far more latitude, because appearance and layout are matters of planning judgment tested against the outline parameter plans and the development plan.

Fees and determination periods

A discharge request carries a flat fee per request rather than a fee per condition, with a lower rate where the parent permission was a householder consent. Those figures sit in the fee regulations and have been indexed annually since April 2025, so check the current schedule before you quote a client. Reserved matters are charged on the same basis as the equivalent full application, by dwelling or by floorspace, which on a large allocation makes them an order of magnitude more expensive.

Article 27 gives the authority eight weeks from receipt of a valid request. Reserved matters follow the ordinary periods, which are eight weeks for minor development and 13 weeks for major, unless an extension of time is agreed in writing.

Eight weeks sounds generous until you set it against a contractor's mobilisation date. Most authorities will not start work on a request until it has been validated and the fee has cleared, and the validation step alone can take a fortnight in a busy team.

Where the wrong route bites

The courts have long distinguished conditions that must be satisfied before development begins from those that simply regulate how the work is carried out. Work started in breach of a true condition precedent is not a lawful implementation of the permission. That reasoning is indicative rather than a formula, and it matters most when a consent is about to expire and someone digs a trench to keep it alive.

Reserved matters carry their own hard deadlines. Under section 92 of the 1990 Act the reserved matters application must be made within three years of the outline grant unless the permission says otherwise, and development must begin within two years of the final approval of the last reserved matter. Submitting the same drawings as a discharge request does not stop that clock, because a discharge decision is not an approval of reserved matters.

The error also runs the other way. Applicants submit a full reserved matters pack, at full fee, for details that were only ever the subject of an ordinary condition. The authority usually spots it and refunds, eventually.

Appealing a refusal

Section 78 of the 1990 Act gives a right of appeal where the authority refuses to approve a matter required by a condition, and where it fails to determine the request within the statutory period. The deadline for lodging is six months from the date of the decision notice for most appeals, and the Planning Inspectorate will reject a late one without much sympathy.

Written representations suit these appeals because the issue is narrow and the evidence is usually a drawing and a specification. What you cannot do on this route is attack the condition itself. If the real complaint is that the condition is unreasonable or fails the tests in national policy, the remedy is a section 73 application or an appeal against the condition within the window that followed the original grant.

A refusal of reserved matters is appealable in the same way, but the principle of development is not back in play. An inspector dealing with reserved matters is confined to the matters reserved.

Deemed discharge and its exclusions

Section 74A of the 1990 Act, inserted by the Infrastructure Act 2015, lets an applicant serve a deemed discharge notice when the authority has sat on a request. The notice cannot be given until at least six weeks after the authority received the application, and it takes effect no earlier than two weeks after service. If the authority still does not decide, the condition is treated as discharged.

Schedule 6 to the DMPO 2015 then removes most of the conditions that actually hold sites up. Conditions on development subject to environmental impact assessment are outside the process, as are conditions connected to a Habitats Regulations Assessment and conditions securing matters that would otherwise sit in a planning obligation. Read the Schedule before you promise a client a shortcut.

The biodiversity gain condition is a separate problem again. Where it applies, the biodiversity gain plan has to be approved by the authority before development may lawfully begin, and no amount of procedural pressure moves that.

Sequencing conditions against a build programme

Since section 100ZA of the 1990 Act came into force, a pre-commencement condition can only be imposed with the applicant's written agreement. That negotiation happens before the decision notice is issued, not afterwards, so the moment to strip out an unnecessary pre-commencement trigger is during the eight-week determination of the main application.

Once the decision notice lands, a practical order of work looks like this.

1. Read every condition on the day it arrives and mark each as pre-commencement, pre-above-ground-works, pre-occupation or ongoing.
2. Identify which ones need survey data with a seasonal window, because those set the real critical path.
3. Bundle the pre-commencement conditions into a single request wherever the evidence is ready, since the fee is charged per request.
4. Submit at least ten weeks before the intended start, allowing for validation and a request for further information.
5. Diarise the six-week point in case a deemed discharge notice becomes worth serving.

As an illustrative example, a twelve-unit scheme carries conditions requiring a construction management plan, a surface water drainage scheme, external materials and a landscaping scheme. The first two are pre-commencement, the third is pre-above-ground-works and the fourth is pre-occupation. Bundling the first two into one request in January, and the remaining two into a second request in April, costs two fees rather than four and keeps the groundworks date intact.

If you are assembling that evidence now, the full list of supporting documents by category is a reasonable place to check what a condition of each type usually expects. Drafts can be produced on PlanScope from a postcode and a short set of answers, then sent for professional review.

This is general guidance, not legal advice, so check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.