Applying through your council or the Planning Portal

There are two ways to submit a planning application in England. The national Planning Portal takes the application, handles the payment and passes it to the local planning authority, charging its own service charge for doing so. Alternatively many councils run their own online submission system, where you complete the forms on the authority's site and pay it directly. A few accept only one of the two, so the first thing to establish on any new site is which routes that authority takes.

The choice sounds administrative. It affects your budget line, your file preparation, your payment reconciliation and, when something goes wrong, who you can actually speak to.

The two routes, and how they differ

The Planning Portal provides one set of forms, one account and one process regardless of which authority you are applying to, which is why practices working across several councils tend to use it. It also handles the statutory forms and certificates and produces the application in the format authorities expect.

Its service charge is levied per application and is separate from the statutory planning fee. The amount is published on the Portal itself and has changed over time, so take it from the current page rather than from a fee schedule you saved last year.

A council's own system removes that charge and often gives a more direct route into the authority's back office. What you lose is consistency: every system has its own form layout, its own upload rules and its own quirks, and an agent working across five authorities is learning five systems.

Neither route changes the statutory planning fee, which is set by national fee regulations, indexed, and payable to the authority whichever way the application arrives.

The fee itself

Planning fees are set by the national fee regulations, they are periodically uplifted, and indexation has applied in recent years. Check the current fee for your application type on the day you submit rather than relying on a figure quoted in an older article or a template appraisal.

Fee errors are one of the more common reasons an application does not validate. The situations that catch people are applications for a mixed development where two categories combine, applications where a floorspace threshold pushes the fee into the next band, and free applications such as listed building consent where an accompanying planning application still attracts a charge.

Where you are unsure, the authority will normally confirm the fee before submission if you send the description and the floorspace. That email is worth having.

Documents, naming and file size

Councils publish their file requirements and they are more prescriptive than most applicants expect.

• One document per file, in PDF, named so the content is obvious. Proposed elevations rather than Scan 0043.
• Drawing numbers and revision references in the file name as well as on the drawing.
• Every drawing with a scale bar and the paper size stated, because a drawing scaled at A1 and printed at A3 is no longer to scale.
• Files within the published size limit. Exported drawings at print resolution regularly exceed it, and the fix is to export at a lower resolution rather than to split the drawing.
• No password protection, no editing restrictions, no CAD files unless requested.

Submit the supporting documents as separate files rather than as one bundle. Consultees receive individual documents, and a highways officer sent a 60 megabyte combined file will ask for the transport chapter separately.

Where the application includes a Planning Statement and a Design and Access Statement, keep them as distinct documents even if the same author wrote both, because the validation checklist lists them separately.

Payment and reconciliation

The Portal takes card payment at submission. Councils running their own systems take card payment, and many also accept bank transfer or issue an invoice for account holders.

Two things cause delay. An application submitted but not paid sits unvalidated until the payment arrives, and nobody chases it. And a payment made without a reference that ties it to the application takes a finance team days to match. Put the site address and the application reference on every payment.

For practices submitting regularly, an account with the authority's finance team removes most of this friction.

Refunds deserve a mention because they are slow. Where an application is withdrawn before determination, or where a fee has been overpaid, the authority will normally refund it, but the process runs through finance rather than through planning and takes weeks. Getting the fee right at submission is considerably faster than getting it back.

Forms, certificates and the things that get missed

The forms themselves cause fewer problems than the certificates attached to them.

Ownership certificates are the usual failure. Certificate A applies where the applicant owns the whole of the application site. Where anyone else owns any part of it, including a strip of verge or a shared drive, a different certificate applies and notice has to be served on the other owner. Getting this wrong invalidates the application, and it can invalidate a permission later, which is a far more serious problem than a validation delay.

Agricultural holdings certificates apply where any part of the site is or was agricultural land in the preceding twenty years, and they catch garden plots on the edge of villages more often than people expect.

Check the description of development before submitting. It appears on the decision notice, it defines what is permitted, and amending it later means either a fresh application or an agreed correction that not every authority will make.

Between submission and validation

Submission is not the start of the clock. The authority checks the application against the national requirements and its own local validation list, and the determination period runs from the date it is valid.

The local list is where most delay originates, because it varies between authorities and is updated periodically. Download the current version before preparing the submission, and read the thresholds attached to each item, since many requirements only apply above a certain scale or within a designated area. You can check the supporting documents by category against the list while the scheme is still being drawn.

In a two tier area the district validates the application while the county comments on highways, education and archaeology, which means a validation query can originate from an authority you have not been dealing with.

When to ring rather than resubmit

A validation query arrives as a standard letter listing outstanding items, and the temptation is to upload something against each one and hope.

Ring instead. Ask which specific item on the list is unsatisfied, and what would satisfy it. Validation officers process large volumes and are generally direct about what they need. Five minutes on the phone regularly resolves a query that would otherwise take a fortnight through the portal messaging system.

Two situations justify pushing back politely. Where the item requested is not on the published local list, and where a threshold in the list means the requirement does not apply to your scheme. In both cases, quote the list back with the paragraph reference and ask for the requirement to be reconsidered.

Keep a record of every call, with the date, the name and the outcome. If the application later goes to appeal on non-determination, that record is part of the history.

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

This is general guidance, not 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.