Conditions you must discharge before work starts

A planning permission carrying a pre-commencement condition is not yet a permission you can act on. Discharge of conditions before starting work means making a separate application to your local planning authority for approval of the details the condition asks for, and until that approval lands, anything you do on site is a breach. On a small housing site there are often four or five of these, covering drainage, materials, ecology mitigation and construction management.

Read the decision notice line by line before you book a groundworker. The wording of each condition, not its position in the list, tells you when it takes effect.

Which conditions bite before you start

Conditions divide by trigger point, and the trigger is in the opening clause. "No development shall take place until" is a condition precedent in the strict sense. "No development above slab level shall take place until" lets you do groundworks first. "Prior to first occupation" leaves the whole build free and only catches handover. A fourth group has no trigger at all and simply regulates how you work, such as hours of operation or a requirement to build in accordance with the approved drawings.

Authorities are not always careful about this. You will see conditions that say "no development shall take place until a landscaping scheme has been submitted" where the substance clearly belongs at occupation. That drafting is still binding until it is changed.

Three things sit outside the condition regime but share the same deadline. A Community Infrastructure Levy commencement notice has to reach the charging authority before work starts, and submitting it late can forfeit any exemption or instalment arrangement, which is covered in more detail in our note on what CIL is calculated on. A biodiversity gain plan needs approval before development begins on most permissions granted since the Environment Act 2021 regime came into force. And where the permission is an outline, the matters reserved for later approval are a separate track altogether, set out in our guide to the five reserved matters.

What starting in breach actually costs you

The hard version of the risk is that the permission never gets implemented. Works carried out in breach of a true condition precedent do not count as a lawful start, which matters when the three-year time limit for commencement is running out. Developers have reached the end of that period believing they had started, only to find the start was unlawful and the permission had lapsed.

The softer version is enforcement. An authority can serve a breach of condition notice under section 187A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. There is no appeal to the Planning Inspectorate against one, and non-compliance is a criminal offence prosecuted in the magistrates' court. An enforcement notice is the other route, with an appeal available but a slower and more expensive argument to have.

Then there is the ordinary commercial damage. Lenders ask for evidence that pre-commencement conditions are discharged before they release funds. Buyers' solicitors ask the same question on plot sales. A condition you meant to deal with in March becomes the reason a completion slips in September.

The restriction on imposing them in the first place

Section 100ZA of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 stops an authority granting permission subject to a pre-commencement condition unless the applicant has agreed to it in writing. The procedure is a notice setting out the proposed condition, its full text and the reason for it, with a window for the applicant to respond substantively. Silence is not a safe answer, because the condition can be imposed if you do not reply.

Most applicants wave these notices through because they want the decision. That is a missed opportunity. If a condition belongs at slab level or at occupation, say so in the response and propose the alternative wording. Officers will often accept a redrafted trigger when the planning purpose is served either way, and a condition you negotiate at that stage costs nothing, while the same change afterwards needs a section 73 application and another eight weeks.

The six tests that any condition has to pass are the other lever here, and we set them out in our piece on what makes a planning condition lawful. A condition failing the necessity or precision test is worth challenging before the decision is issued rather than after.

How long approval takes

The statutory period for determining an application for approval of details reserved by a condition is eight weeks from receipt, or longer if you agree an extension in writing. Treat eight weeks as the floor rather than the expectation. Conditions needing a consultee response, such as the lead local flood authority on drainage or the county archaeologist on a written scheme of investigation, run to the consultee's timetable, and a drainage condition that needs infiltration testing cannot be answered faster than the ground can be dug and tested.

There is a deemed discharge mechanism under section 74A of the 1990 Act, which lets an applicant serve notice and treat a condition as discharged if the authority has not determined the application in time. It sounds better than it is. Schedule 6 to the Development Management Procedure Order 2015 excludes a long list of categories, and the exclusions catch many of the conditions that cause real delay. Read the schedule before you build a programme around it.

Fees are charged per request, not per condition, and the national schedule is indexed annually. Check the current figures on the government's fees guidance before you budget, because the rate changed in 2023 and has moved since.

Bundling, partial discharge and phases

One application can cover several conditions. There is usually nothing to gain from splitting them, and the per-request fee structure means splitting costs more. The exception is where one condition is ready and another is waiting on a seasonal survey. Submitting the ready ones keeps the clock moving.

Partial discharge is possible and common. An authority can approve the details for conditions 4, 6 and 9 and ask for more on condition 7, issuing a decision that discharges what it can. Ask for this explicitly in the covering letter rather than assuming it.

Phased discharge is a different thing. Where the permission is phased, conditions often read "before each phase begins", which means you discharge them phase by phase and the approval for phase one does not carry phase two. Check whether the condition is site-wide or phase-specific, because the two look almost identical on the page.

A sequence that keeps the programme intact

1. On the day the decision notice arrives, tabulate every condition with its trigger, the information it wants and the lead time to produce that information.
2. Identify anything seasonal. Bat emergence surveys run from May to September and great crested newt survey windows are tighter still, so an ecology condition found in October is a nine-month problem.
3. Book the ground investigation early if any condition touches drainage, contamination or foundations, because infiltration testing and laboratory turnaround sit on the critical path.
4. Submit the non-seasonal conditions as one application as soon as the information is ready, and agree an extension of time in writing if the authority asks rather than letting the period expire.
5. Serve the Community Infrastructure Levy commencement notice and secure biodiversity gain plan approval, then record the date you start in a way you could evidence later.

The number of supporting documents a discharge application needs surprises people. A single drainage condition can call for a drainage strategy, infiltration test results, exceedance flow routing and a maintenance schedule. You can see which of the 66 report types typically sit behind each kind of condition, and draft the narrative documents yourself rather than paying for them twice.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it, since condition wording varies and the consequences of getting a trigger point wrong fall on the landowner.

Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which reports your site is likely to need before you start drafting the discharge submission.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.