Call-in by the Secretary of State or a recovered appeal

Call-in and recovery both end with a minister deciding a planning case, but they take the decision from different people at different stages. Call-in under section 77 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 removes an undetermined application from the local planning authority. Recovery under Schedule 6 to the same Act removes the decision on an appeal from the inspector who heard it. If you are working out whether a live case is heading for a ministerial decision, the question of call in or recovered appeal turns on whether the authority has decided yet.

What each power does to the decision maker

On call-in, the application is referred to the Secretary of State and determined centrally. The authority never issues a decision notice. The usual route is a public inquiry before an inspector who then reports with a recommendation, and the Secretary of State issues the decision letter.

On recovery, the appeal machinery is untouched. The appeal is made in the normal way against refusal or non-determination, the inquiry, hearing or written representations proceed as they would have done, and the inspector writes a report with a recommendation instead of a decision. The Secretary of State then decides.

The practical difference for an applicant is timing and posture. A called-in application has no refusal behind it, so there is no decision notice to argue with and no committee reasoning to attack. A recovered appeal has both, plus a case that was already pleaded against the authority's reasons.

The criteria for call-in

The power is discretionary and is exercised sparingly. Successive ministers have confirmed that the call-in policy follows the criteria set out in a written ministerial statement in 1999, which limits intervention to cases raising issues of more than local importance. Those include conflict with national policy on an important matter, effects extending well beyond the immediate locality, substantial regional or national controversy, major architectural or urban design questions, and the interests of national security or of foreign governments.

A request for call-in usually arrives from an objector, a parish council, a member of Parliament or a statutory body. Where the department wants time to consider the request, it issues a holding direction under Article 31 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015. That direction stops the authority granting permission but leaves it free to refuse, which is a trap worth flagging to a client. A holding direction is not a hold on the whole process.

The criteria for recovery

Recovery criteria are published and updated by written ministerial statement, so the current list needs checking at the time the appeal is lodged rather than remembered from the last one. The classes have long included residential schemes above a stated size, proposals affecting the Green Belt, cases raising major policy questions or national controversy, retail above a stated floorspace, sites for traveller accommodation, and proposals involving national security or the interests of other states.

Recovery is decided by the Planning Inspectorate on the department's instruction, and the parties are notified in writing. It can happen at the start, or part way through, or after the inquiry has closed. That last possibility matters for programming, because an appeal you expected to be decided six weeks after the inquiry can slip by months once the report goes to a minister.

Procedure and timescales

A called-in application is usually handled by inquiry, with the authority and applicant exchanging statements of case, proofs of evidence and a statement of common ground. Rule 6 status lets a third party participate fully. The authority's planning case is normally built from the officer's assessment and the policy analysis that would otherwise have gone to committee, which is why the quality of the original Planning Statement tends to shape the inquiry more than people expect.

Recovered appeals follow the ordinary procedure for their route. Written representations remain written representations. The additional time sits at the end, in the gap between the inspector's report and the decision letter. Neither power has a statutory deadline for the ministerial decision, so a case can sit for a long time, and there is no mechanism to compel a decision short of judicial review of the delay itself.

Illustrative example: a 220 home scheme on the edge of a Green Belt settlement is refused by committee against officer advice, appealed by inquiry, and recovered two weeks before the inquiry opens. The evidence is unchanged. The programme gains an unquantifiable tail, and the applicant's funding assumptions have to absorb it.

What the authority does once the power is used

On call-in the authority becomes a party rather than a decision maker, and the committee resolution that would have followed is instead expressed as the authority's case at the inquiry. Members can still meet and resolve what case to advance, and often do.

On recovery the authority's role does not change at all. It defends its reasons for refusal exactly as it would before an inspector. The only difference is who signs the decision.

Both routes leave the development plan as the starting point under section 38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. National policy carries the weight a minister chooses to give it as a material consideration, and a decision letter that departs from an inspector's recommendation has to give reasons for the disagreement. Those letters repay close reading, and tracking them through the planning law timeline takes little effort.

Challenging the outcome

There is no appeal against either decision. The route is a statutory application to the High Court under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, to be made within six weeks of the decision, on the ground that the decision is not within the powers of the Act or that relevant requirements have not been complied with.

The practical grounds are familiar to anyone who has run a section 288 case: a failure to give adequate reasons, a misinterpretation of policy, a failure to take a material consideration into account, or procedural unfairness where a minister disagreed with the inspector on a point the parties had no chance to address. Where a minister departs from a recommendation on a matter of fact rather than planning judgement, the reasons need to be fuller, and that is where challenges tend to bite.

How often each is used

Both powers are used rarely. Call-in is the rarer of the two, and in most years the number of applications called in nationally is small enough that each case is individually reported in the planning press. Recovery is more common but still a small fraction of appeals, concentrated in the published categories.

For a client asking whether to expect one, the honest answer is that neither is worth planning around unless the case already sits squarely inside a published criterion. What is worth doing is preparing the evidence base as though an inquiry were coming, because a called-in or recovered case is examined harder than a delegated decision ever is. If you are assembling that evidence base, PlanScope can draft the supporting statements from your site data and guided answers, and you can see the full list of report types before deciding what to commission externally.

This is general guidance rather than legal advice. 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.