Pre-application advice queues and the new financial year

Pre application advice timing is a programming decision, not an administrative one. Councils set their discretionary charges and their target response times for the financial year, and most revise both around 1 April. A request submitted in the last week of March may be charged under the old schedule and answered under the new one, or the reverse, depending on how the authority dates receipt. Ask which applies before you transfer the fee.

National planning application fees follow the same calendar. They were uplifted in December 2023 and are subject to annual indexation from April, so a scheme whose submission slips past the start of the financial year pays more than the figure quoted in a fee proposal written the previous autumn.

What pre-application advice delivers

Councils charge for pre-application advice under their general power to charge for discretionary services in the Local Government Act 2003. It is discretionary in both directions: no authority has to offer it, and none has to answer within a fixed time.

What you buy is an officer's view on the principle of development, the policies that will be applied, the documents that will be required at validation, and usually a list of the issues that would otherwise appear in a refusal. At the upper fee bands that normally includes a meeting and a written note.

What you do not buy is a decision. Officer advice cannot bind the authority, and an officer who indicated support at pre-app can recommend refusal after consultation responses arrive. Our note on what a council officer can and cannot promise covers that distinction in detail.

Fee bands and the date they change

Most authorities band their charges by development type and scale, with householder work at the bottom, minor schemes in the middle and majors at the top, often with an hourly rate for anything beyond a set number of officer hours. Bands vary widely between authorities, so treat any figure you remember from a neighbouring borough as unreliable.

Three questions decide which schedule you pay under:

1. Does the authority date the request from submission, from payment, or from the point it is validated as complete?
2. Is the quoted figure inclusive of any follow-up meeting or is that charged separately?
3. Where the scheme grows between request and meeting, is the fee recalculated?

Our guide to what council fee bands buy you sets out the usual structure. The practical instruction is to download the current published schedule on the day you submit and keep a copy, because schedules are replaced on the website without notice and disputes six months later are unwinnable without one.

Response times and how to programme around them

There is no statutory period for pre-application advice and no national dataset of how long authorities actually take. Published targets are the only reliable guide, and they are targets rather than commitments.

So programme defensively. Work backwards from the date you need a decision, allow the published target plus a margin, and identify what can proceed in parallel. Survey work with fixed seasons, ownership and title checks, and measured building surveys can all run while the pre-app is with the council.

None of that is a rule, and authorities differ. Check the council's own published service standard and its committee calendar rather than assuming a pattern.

Planning performance agreements as the alternative

For a major scheme, a planning performance agreement is the better instrument. A PPA is a voluntary project management agreement between the applicant and the authority that sets out the scope of work, the officer resource committed, a programme with milestones, and the fee for that resource.

The advantage over pre-app is that the agreement runs through the application itself, so the determination period is negotiated rather than governed by the default eight or 13 weeks. The disadvantage is cost and the fact that an agreement commits you to a programme too. Whether the trade is worth making is covered in our piece on when a PPA is worth signing.

What to send to get a useful answer

The quality of the answer tracks the quality of the request almost exactly. A sketch and a paragraph produces a paragraph in return.

Two further things belong in the covering note: the programme you are working to, so the officer knows whether a late response is useless, and the identity of any consultee you have already approached directly. Officers dislike discovering that a highway authority has been consulted in parallel and given different advice.

Send a site location plan with the application site edged red and any other land in the same ownership edged blue, existing and proposed plans at a stated scale even if indicative, a short description of the proposal with floorspace and unit numbers, photographs of the site and its context, a note of the constraints you have already identified, and a specific list of questions. Numbered questions get numbered answers.

State what you already know. An officer reading a request that has clearly checked the adopted policies, the flood map and the designations spends the time on the difficult issues instead of repeating the constraint search back to you.

How much weight the advice carries later

Pre-application advice is a material consideration at the decision stage, but its weight depends on how specific it was and whether circumstances have changed. Advice given before a new local plan was adopted, or before a consultee objected, carries little.

Keep the written note and quote it in the Planning Statement where the scheme has responded to it. Officers report their own advice in the committee report, and a scheme that visibly took the advice is harder to refuse on the points the advice raised.

Where advice was given verbally at a meeting, write it up yourself and send it to the officer asking for confirmation or correction. Silence is not agreement, but an unchallenged note is better evidence than a recollection.

When to skip it

Not every scheme benefits. A householder extension plainly within the adopted design guidance, a change of use inside Class E that needs no permission at all, or a resubmission responding to a clearly worded refusal are all cases where the fee buys little.

A resubmission is the borderline case. Where the refusal reasons are precise and the amended scheme answers each one, the fee adds little. Where the reasons are broadly worded and the officer who wrote them has since left, a short paid exchange buys clarity that a phone call will not.

Skip it too where the answer is already known and unfavourable. Paying for an officer to write down that the principle is unacceptable creates a document that follows the site, and on a scheme you intend to appeal that is an expensive own goal.

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.

Browse the 66 report types to work out which documents a pre-application request should anticipate.