Outline planning application checklist: matters to reserve

An outline planning application asks a council to approve the principle of development and to hold specified details over to a later submission. The five matters you can reserve are access, appearance, landscaping, layout and scale, defined in article 2 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015. So any outline planning application checklist starts with one decision: which of those five you reserve, and what article 5 of that Order then obliges you to supply for each one you have reserved. Reserve too little and you pay for detail you may redesign. Reserve too much and you end up with a permission nobody can build against.

Choosing which matters to reserve

The test is commercial rather than procedural. Reserve a matter when the answer depends on information you do not yet have: a housebuilder's product range, a viability outcome, a ground investigation, an adopted design code. Keep a matter in for determination when fixing it now buys certainty worth more than the flexibility you give up.

Three patterns recur. A land promoter selling on with the benefit of consent reserves all five and relies on parameter plans to carry the value. A developer with a known housetype palette reserves appearance and landscaping only, because layout and scale are already set by the road geometry and the drainage strategy. And a site with one awkward junction takes access out of the reserved list entirely, because the highway authority will not accept the principle of development without seeing that junction designed.

Nothing stops you mixing. A hybrid application, part full and part outline, is common on phased sites where the first phase is ready and the rest is not.

What a parameter plan has to fix

Article 5 of the 2015 Order sets the minimum. Where layout is reserved you must still state the approximate location of buildings, routes and open spaces. Where scale is reserved you must give an upper and a lower limit for the height, width and length of each building. Where access is reserved you must show the area or areas in which the access points will be situated.

The trap is precision you cannot justify later. A maximum height of 11.4 metres reads as though someone modelled it. If the figure came from a sketch, use a band. Ranges want to be wide enough to absorb a change of floor-to-floor height or a redesign of the surface water strategy, and tight enough that an officer can assess the worst case.

That worst case matters for environmental impact assessment. Where the scheme is EIA development under the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017, the Environmental Statement has to assess the envelope you have drawn, and an envelope with no upper bound cannot be assessed. Assessing a defined maximum envelope on an outline application is often called the Rochdale envelope after the case in which the approach was considered. Treat it as how inspectors have handled the problem rather than a rule written into the Regulations.

Access when it is not reserved

Access covers accessibility for vehicles and for people, together with the position and treatment of the access itself. Leave it out of the reserved list and you are applying for it in detail, which means a drawing the highway authority can take a position on: visibility splays, junction geometry, footway widths, tracking for a refuse vehicle.

Bring the transport evidence with it. A scheme of 50 or more dwellings, or 2,500 m² or more of floorspace, will normally attract a full Transport Assessment rather than the shorter statement, and the highway authority will want trip generation, junction capacity and a walking and cycling audit before it comments on your junction drawing.

There is a second reason to keep access in. A reserved matters application cannot cure a fundamental problem with the principle. If the only workable access needs third-party land or the felling of a protected tree, have that argued out at outline stage, when a refusal costs you an appeal rather than a stranded permission.

Illustrative material and how officers treat it

Most outline applications include an illustrative masterplan. Label it clearly, state on the drawing that it is illustrative, and list it as such in the document schedule.

Then expect the council to condition it anyway. A common condition requires the reserved matters submission to be in broad accordance with the illustrative masterplan, which quietly converts a sketch into a control. If that is not what you want, say so in the covering letter and name the drawings you are content to be bound by. A Design and Access Statement is the right place to set out the design principles you will commit to, kept separate from the drawing that shows one way of meeting them.

The same discipline applies to unit numbers. A description of development reading "up to 120 dwellings" gives you a ceiling you can undershoot. A bare "120 dwellings" is a number you may have to deliver, and it drives affordable housing, Community Infrastructure Levy liability and open space calculations from the day the permission is issued.

Conditions that carry through to reserved matters

Ask the case officer for the draft conditions before the decision is issued. Three kinds cause trouble later:

1. Pre-commencement conditions that bite before any reserved matters approval, which need your written agreement under section 100ZA of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.
2. Conditions requiring information at reserved matters stage that the outline should have settled, such as a drainage strategy expected to work with a layout nobody has drawn.
3. Conditions tying the permission to a parameter plan by drawing number and revision. Supersede the plan and you need a section 96A or section 73 application to move.

A Planning Statement that sets out which matters are reserved, why, and how each will be dealt with later gives the officer a route to sensible conditions. It also gives you something to point at when a draft condition asks for the impossible.

Time limits and the two clocks

Section 92 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 sets the default position. Applications for approval of reserved matters must be made within three years of the grant of outline permission, and development must begin within two years of the final approval of reserved matters. A council can vary both periods by condition, and some do, so read the decision notice rather than assuming the standard wording.

Two points get missed. The three-year clock runs from the outline permission itself, not from the first reserved matters approval, so a phased submission still has to get every phase in within that window. And on a phased site the two-year clock runs from the final approval, which can be read phase by phase where the permission is drafted that way. If the permission is silent, ask for explicit wording rather than arguing about it four years later.

Where an over-specified outline costs you

An outline permission with a fixed layout, heights to the nearest 100 mm and a schedule of housetypes is a full permission wearing a different hat. You paid the outline fee, you accepted the delay of a second application, and you kept none of the flexibility you were buying.

The commoner failure is quieter. Parameter plans drawn off an illustrative layout inherit its accidents: a building line following a hedge the arboricultural survey later says has to go, or a spine road width the highway authority will not adopt. Draw the parameters from the constraints and the policy tests first, then test the illustrative layout against them. If the illustrative layout will not fit inside your own envelope, the envelope is wrong.

Check the current planning fee schedule before you submit, because outline fees are calculated on site area and the national fees are indexed annually from 1 April. Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which reports your site is likely to need at outline stage, or work through the full report list if you are scoping a submission from scratch.

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.