Permission in principle: what it means in planning

Permission in principle settles three things about a site and nothing else: the use, the location and the amount of development. It cannot carry a planning condition. It cannot be tied to a section 106 agreement. It tells you the council accepts housing here, at roughly this quantum, and it leaves every technical question to a second application called technical details consent.

The power sits in section 58A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, inserted by the Housing and Planning Act 2016, with the detail in the Town and Country Planning (Permission in Principle) Order 2017. It is a two-stage consent, and the first stage is deliberately thin.

What "in principle" covers, and what it leaves out

Use means the type of development, and in practice that means housing, either alone or as the leading element of a mixed scheme. Location means the red line. Amount means a number of dwellings, usually expressed as a range, or a floorspace figure for the non-residential element.

Everything else is out of scope at this stage. Access arrangements, drainage, layout, height, materials, parking, trees, contamination, ecology, noise and archaeology all wait. So the grant is narrower than most landowners expect when they read the phrase.

What it does give you is a decision the council cannot reopen. When technical details consent comes forward, the authority must not refuse it on the ground that housing is unacceptable in that location, or cut the amount below the granted range. That is a genuine constraint on the officer, and it is the reason the route is worth using at all.

The two routes in

The register route is passive from the landowner's point of view, and it is underused because Part 2 entry is discretionary and many authorities keep their registers to Part 1 only. Getting a site into Part 2 means persuading the council, which is a policy conversation rather than an application. We set out how that works in brownfield land registers and how a site gets on one, and what the entry actually buys in brownfield land registers and what being on one means.

The application route is the one a small developer controls. It runs with a 14-day publicity period, a short determination period and no requirement to submit anything beyond a plan showing the site, a description of the housing and the amount proposed. There is no design, no drainage strategy and no supporting statement in the statutory requirements, though a short note explaining why the principle is acceptable does no harm. The mechanics are covered in permission in principle by application: what it does.

Fees are indexed, so confirm the current rate against the fee schedule rather than an older figure.

Technical details consent is where the work lands

This is the stage people underestimate. Technical details consent is determined in five weeks for minor development and ten weeks for major development, and the council assesses everything the permission in principle did not. Conditions attach here. Obligations are negotiated here. The biodiversity gain condition bites here, which means a scheme caught by the Environment Act 2021 regime needs the statutory metric completed by a competent person and a biodiversity gain plan approved before development begins.

A realistic technical details submission for a small housing site carries drawings plus a supporting pack that often includes:

• a Planning Statement setting the scheme against adopted local plan policy
• a Design and Access Statement where the application type requires one
• a Preliminary Ecological Appraisal and the biodiversity net gain calculation
• a drainage strategy and, on sites of one hectare or more or in Flood Zone 2 or 3, a Flood Risk Assessment
• a tree survey to BS 5837:2012 where trees are present
• a transport statement where the access or trip generation is contested

None of that was needed to get the permission in principle. All of it is needed to build. If the technical work later shows the site cannot take the amount of development granted, the permission in principle does not help, because the council is only barred from refusing on the settled matters and not from refusing on the unsettled ones.

Timing, expiry and what lapses

Three years from an application grant, five years from a register entry. The clock runs from the date of the grant, and there is no mechanism to extend it. Miss the window and the site reverts to having no consent at all.

That pushes the sequence in one direction for anyone using the route commercially. Get the permission in principle, then commission the surveys with seasonal constraints immediately, because bat emergence surveys run roughly May to September and great crested newt environmental DNA sampling sits between mid-April and the end of June. A three-year window sounds generous until you lose a survey season waiting for a land deal to complete.

Where the route earns its place

It suits a specific case: a small, uncontroversial plot where the argument is about whether housing belongs there at all, and where the landowner does not want to spend £10,000 on technical work before finding out. A garden plot on the edge of a settlement boundary. A redundant yard behind a high street. A single infill gap in a village where the council has resisted development before.

A landowner selling with the benefit of a permission in principle should also expect a buyer to discount it. The document proves the principle and carries none of the technical risk, so a purchaser will still price in the surveys, the access negotiation and the drainage solution. Where the site is worth promoting properly, an outline application with reserved matters usually produces a more bankable consent, at a higher cost and over a longer period.

It suits a contested scheme badly. If the council's objection is access geometry or flood risk, permission in principle settles nothing useful and you have spent a fee to be told that housing is acceptable in a location where nobody doubted it. And if the site is in a designated area, affects a listed building or needs environmental impact assessment, the application route is simply not available.

One honest uncertainty: uptake has stayed low since the route opened in 2018, and because volumes are small there is little appeal precedent to read across from. Officers in some authorities have handled very few, which is a reason to use pre-application advice before you apply.

If you are scoping the technical details stage, browse all 66 PlanScope report types to see which documents a small housing site is likely to need.

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.