Local development orders and what they permit

A local development order grants planning permission in advance for specified types of development within a defined area, so a scheme that falls squarely within an order needs no planning application at all. Councils make them under section 61A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, usually to speed up development on employment land, in town centres or on a regeneration site. If an order covers your site and your proposal fits its description, the only step is to comply with whatever notification the order requires.

The hard part is establishing whether you fit. Orders are drafted tightly, and the parameters matter more than the intention behind them.

What a local development order does

An order extends permitted development rights for a particular place. It can permit building operations, changes of use, or both, and it can be geographically specific down to a single site or cover a whole industrial estate.

Three features distinguish it from the national permitted development rights in the General Permitted Development Order 2015. It is made by the local planning authority rather than by Parliament. It can be tailored to local circumstances, including the design parameters the authority is content with. And it carries its own conditions and limitations, which can be more detailed than anything in the national order.

An order does not remove other consent regimes. Listed building consent, environmental permits, Building Regulations approval, highway agreements under the Highways Act 1980 and the biodiversity gain condition where it applies all continue to operate. An order that permits a 2,000 m² industrial unit still leaves a drainage approval and a highway licence to obtain.

How an order is made and consulted on

The process is set out in the Development Management Procedure Order 2015 and runs broadly as follows:

1. The authority prepares a draft order describing the development permitted, the land affected, and the conditions and limitations.
2. It publishes the draft with a statement of reasons and consults, including a site notice, local advertisement and notification of anyone who would be affected.
3. Where the order could permit development requiring environmental impact assessment or affecting a habitats site, the authority has to deal with that before the order can take effect.
4. It considers representations, amends the draft if needed, and adopts the order.
5. It publishes the adopted order and notifies the Secretary of State, and the order takes effect on the date it states.

A sustainability appraisal is normally produced, and in practice authorities also publish a design code or parameters document alongside the order so that applicants know what will qualify. The Secretary of State retains powers in relation to orders, and an order can be revoked.

Typical uses

Three patterns account for most orders in England.

Employment land is the commonest. An authority with an allocated industrial estate makes an order permitting new and extended industrial and storage buildings within stated height, footprint and siting parameters, with conditions on parking, landscaping, surface water and hours. The commercial attraction is certainty and speed for occupiers who need a building by a fixed date.

Town centre orders permit changes of use and shopfront alterations that would otherwise need permission, typically to support reoccupation of vacant units. Regeneration site orders cover a single large site where the authority or a development corporation wants to fix the parameters once and let delivery follow in phases.

Housing is less common, partly because the biodiversity gain condition, affordable housing and infrastructure contributions are hard to secure through an order rather than through a planning obligation. Authorities that want to capture contributions generally prefer an application route, and our note on section 106 monitoring fees and what they cover explains part of why.

Conditions and limitations within an order

This is the section to read first, because it is where most proposals fail. Conditions in an order can do everything a condition on a planning permission can do, and they attach automatically to anything built under it.

Typical content includes maximum building height and footprint, minimum separation from boundaries, approved external materials or a materials palette, parking and cycle standards, a requirement to implement a landscaping scheme, surface water drainage limits expressed as a discharge rate, restrictions on hours of operation or on specific uses within a class, a requirement to notify the authority before work starts, and a time limit after which the order lapses unless renewed.

Where a proposal breaches a condition, the development is not permitted by the order at all. There is no mechanism to vary an order's condition for one site, so the choice is to redesign to fit or to apply for planning permission in the ordinary way. A Planning Statement that explains why the proposal sits outside the order and why permission should still be granted is the usual starting point for that application.

Checking whether an order covers a site

Orders are local instruments and they are not reliably published as national datasets, so the check has to be made against the council's own records.

1. Search the authority's planning policy pages for local development orders, and check any regeneration or enterprise area pages separately.
2. Ask the planning department directly, in writing, naming the site and the proposal.
3. Obtain the order document itself along with its plan, rather than relying on a summary page.
4. Check the plan boundary against your title plan, because order boundaries follow land parcels that may have changed.
5. Check the order's expiry or review date and whether it has been amended since adoption.
6. Check whether the order is subject to any notification or prior notification requirement, and what information that requires.

Keep the written answer. Where there is any doubt that a proposal falls within an order, a certificate of lawfulness for proposed use or development under section 192 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 is the only formal way to confirm that the development would be lawful. Our guide to checking surface water and critical drainage areas locally covers one of the constraint checks that orders commonly leave to the applicant.

Notification requirements under an order

Most orders require the developer to notify the authority before work starts, and some require the submission of details for approval, which functions much like a prior approval. The notification usually has to include a site plan, the proposed building dimensions, external materials, drainage arrangements and a statement confirming compliance with each condition.

Treat it as a submission rather than a courtesy. A notification that does not demonstrate compliance invites the authority to say the development falls outside the order, and that conversation is much harder once foundations are in. Where the order requires details to be approved, build the determination period into the programme.

Revocation and live schemes

An authority can revoke or amend an order, and the Secretary of State has powers in relation to orders as well. Revocation does not usually undo development already carried out, and the position of a scheme that has started but not finished depends on the terms of the revocation and on whether the development was lawfully begun under the order.

That uncertainty is a reason to start work promptly once you have relied on an order, and to keep contemporaneous evidence of what was built and when. Where an order has an expiry date, check how long it has left before you commit to a design that only works under it. Authorities also publish what they collect and spend through other mechanisms, and our note on infrastructure funding statements and where the money went shows what those reports contain.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

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