Making the statement of common ground do real work

A statement of common ground is the document that tells the inspector which facts are not in dispute, so that inquiry or hearing time is spent on the questions that actually decide the appeal. It is required for inquiries and hearings under the appeal procedure rules, and the Planning Inspectorate's procedural guide sets the date yours has to arrive. Treated properly it removes a day of evidence. Treated as a formality it becomes a liability, because an inspector who finds the parties arguing about the site area on day two will draw conclusions about the rest of your evidence.

The discipline is simple. Agree everything capable of agreement, record the disagreements in terms both sides would accept, and do it before proofs of evidence are exchanged rather than after.

What the document is for

The statement is a joint document of the appellant and the local planning authority. It is not advocacy, and it carries no argument about weight or planning balance. Its purpose is to fix the factual and policy baseline so that the proofs can go straight to the contested judgements.

Post-Rosewell inquiry practice pushes this work earlier. Case management directions commonly require a draft statement in advance of the case management conference and a signed version well before proofs, which is a change from the older habit of finalising it the week before. Read the start letter and the directions rather than working from the default in the rules, because the inspector's timetable governs.

A good statement also does something the rules do not require. It gives the inspector a single reliable description of the site, the proposal and the policy framework, which means your proof does not have to spend 800 words setting the scene.

Facts that should always be agreed

Start from the position that anything measurable is agreeable. The list below is the working minimum for a residential appeal, and most of it transfers to commercial cases.

• The site area, the red line, ownership and the certificate served.
• The description of development as amended, and the final list of drawings and documents before the authority, with revision numbers.
• The planning history of the site, including any lawful development certificate, extant permission or previous refusal, with reference numbers and dates.
• The development plan, the date each document was adopted, and the full text of every policy either party relies on.
• Which policies the authority accepts are out of date, and whether the tilted balance is engaged.
• Housing land supply position as at an agreed base date, or an agreed statement that the parties disagree and by how much.
• Constraints: flood zone, conservation area, listed buildings within a stated radius with their grades, tree preservation orders, Green Belt status.
• The consultation responses received and which statutory consultees objected.
• The conditions both sides agree should be imposed if the appeal succeeds, and any section 106 heads of terms.

Agreeing the drawing list sounds trivial. It is the item that most often unravels, because an authority determined the application on revision C and the appellant appealed on revision D. Sort that out in the statement and the inspector knows which scheme is before them.

The policy text matters for the same reason. Reproducing the relevant parts of the adopted plan in an appendix, agreed and paginated, stops the hearing turning into a search through a 400-page document. Where your case rests on how the proposal meets a design or heritage policy, the reasoning belongs in the Planning Statement and the proof, and the agreed policy wording belongs here.

When the council will not engage

This happens, usually because the case officer has left, the authority is under-resourced, or the refusal was contrary to officer recommendation and nobody internally owns the appeal. The answer is to do the work for them.

1. Send a complete draft with everything agreed from your side, tracked and dated, plus a short covering note listing the five or six matters you expect to be contentious.
2. Set a reasonable deadline aligned with the inspector's timetable and copy the case officer's line manager.
3. If there is no response, send a unilateral statement clearly marked as such, recording what was sent, when, and that the authority did not respond.
4. Raise it at the case management conference. Inspectors are alert to it and will usually direct a date.

A unilateral statement is weaker than an agreed one. It still protects you, because it shows the inspector that the delay is not yours and it gives a factual baseline nobody has contradicted. It can also support an application for costs on the ground of unreasonable behaviour, though that is a separate exercise with its own evidential threshold.

Technical appendices and agreed modelling

The highest-value agreement in most inquiries is technical. Two acoustic consultants disagreeing about a measured background sound level waste more inquiry time than any policy point, and the disagreement is usually about method rather than outcome.

Agree the inputs before the outputs. For transport, that means the trip generation source, the survey dates, the assessment years and the junction models used. For daylight and sunlight, the BRE 209 (2022) targets applied, the window mapping, the model geometry and whether existing rooms have been surveyed internally. For flood risk, the climate change allowance applied, the modelled levels and the source of the topographic survey. For ecology, the survey effort, the dates, the seasons covered and the habitat baseline entered into the statutory metric.

Where the parties agree the inputs, the remaining difference is professional judgement, which is exactly what an inspector is there to weigh. Where the inputs differ, the inspector has to resolve a technical dispute with no independent evidence, and both sides usually lose something.

A short worked illustration, and it is illustrative only. On an appeal about a 40-unit scheme, the parties agreed the TRICS site selection, the survey period and the distribution, and disagreed only on whether a 12 per cent trip reduction for the travel plan was justified. That single agreed appendix reduced two transport proofs to eight pages each and took half a day out of the inquiry.

Recording disagreement precisely

Most statements are too vague about what is in dispute. "The parties disagree about heritage impact" tells the inspector nothing. "The parties agree the appeal building is a non-designated heritage asset and that the proposal would remove the rear wing. They disagree about whether the resulting harm is low or moderate, and about the weight to be given to it" tells the inspector what to listen for.

Write each disagreement as a question the inspector can answer. Keep the wording neutral, so that neither side is quoting the other's case back at them. And resist the temptation to slip an argument into the description of the dispute, because the authority will ask for it to come out and you will have spent a week on drafting rather than on evidence.

Where a matter has been agreed subject to a condition, say so and attach the condition wording. Where agreement depends on a survey that has not been completed, record the date it is expected. Inspectors accept provisional entries when they are labelled as such. They do not accept a statement that quietly goes silent on a live issue. Reading the refusal reasons closely at the outset pays here, and our note on reading reasons for refusal covers how to translate them into a list of agreed and disputed matters.

Signing, late changes and the inquiry itself

The statement should be signed by someone with authority on each side, usually the appellant's agent and the authority's appeals or development management manager. Date it. If facts move after signature, issue a short addendum rather than reissuing the whole document, and flag it in your opening submissions.

Late changes are survivable. Concealed changes are not. If a housing land supply position updates between signature and the inquiry, tell the inspector on day one and hand up an agreed note. The alternative is a cross-examination question you cannot answer.

Inspectors use the statement as the factual spine of the decision letter. Passages describing the site, the history and the policy framework frequently appear in the decision in close to the agreed wording, which is a good reason to draft those sections with care. Your proof of evidence can then open on the first contested issue. Third party evidence sits outside the statement and is handled separately, as our note on interested party representations explains.

This is general guidance on appeal procedure, not legal advice, and the timetable for your appeal is set by the Inspectorate's directions rather than by any general rule. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.

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