Pre-application charging: what a fee band includes

A pre-application advice fee buys officer time, not an answer you can rely on. The charge sits on section 93 of the Local Government Act 2003, which lets a best value authority charge for a discretionary service and requires that income from the charge does not exceed the cost of providing it, taking one financial year with another. Pre-application advice is discretionary. Determining your application is not, and that fee is set nationally by regulations.

That distinction explains most of what follows, including why the bands vary so much between authorities and why the quality of what you get back varies with them.

Where the power to charge comes from

Planning application fees are fixed by the Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications) (England) Regulations 2012 as amended, and indexed annually. An authority cannot charge more or less than the prescribed figure.

Pre-application advice falls outside that regime entirely. The authority chooses whether to offer the service, chooses what it costs within the section 93 limit, and publishes a schedule it can change at any time. Some authorities offer householder advice without charge and price everything else. Some charge for every enquiry. None of them are obliged to answer at all, which is worth remembering when an enquiry sits unanswered for six weeks.

The cost ceiling in section 93 is a real constraint, not a formality. Charges are meant to reflect the work involved, which is why schedules are banded by scale and complexity rather than set at a single figure.

How fee bands are usually structured

Published schedules tend to divide the service along two axes: the scale of the development, and the depth of the service.

The figures themselves change on 1 April in many authorities, alongside the national fee indexation. Download the current schedule rather than reusing the fee from the last job, and check whether VAT is added, because authorities differ in how they treat it.

Two details in the small print matter more than the headline price. First, the stated response time, which is a service aim rather than a deadline. Second, what counts as a second enquiry: a revised scheme returning for a view is often a new fee, and a scheme that evolves three times can cost more in advice than in application fees.

What a written response should contain

A response worth the money reads like a short officer report on a scheme that has not been submitted yet. Judge it against this list:

1. The development plan policies engaged, named and dated, with the relevant supplementary documents.
2. A view on the principle of the development, expressed clearly enough to be useful.
3. The site constraints the authority holds data on, including designations the applicant may not have found.
4. The design points the officer would resist, and the ones they would support.
5. The documents needed for validation, including anything on the local list beyond the national requirements.
6. The likely conditions, the probable section 106 heads of terms and the Community Infrastructure Levy position.
7. Which internal or statutory consultees were asked, and what they said.

Responses that stop at a recitation of policy numbers and a paragraph saying the proposal would be assessed on its merits have told you nothing you could not read yourself. Where that happens, go back once, politely, with the specific questions that were not answered. Most authorities would rather resolve it than argue about a refund.

Meetings, site visits and the follow-up question

A meeting earns its fee when it is used to test alternatives rather than to present a finished design. Bring two or three options, a constraints plan and a short agenda, and ask the officer to react. Bring a fully resolved scheme and the meeting becomes a presentation with no useful outcome.

Ask these before you pay:

• How many officer hours the band pays for
• Whether a site visit is included, and whether it happens before or after the written advice
• Which consultees are included, and the cost of adding the highway authority or the conservation officer
• Whether the written advice follows the meeting, which is the sequence you want
• Whether a revised scheme returns to the same officer

Take your own note of the meeting and send it to the officer with a line asking them to correct anything they disagree with. An uncorrected note is useful at appeal. A note nobody wrote is worth nothing.

The weight the advice carries later

Pre-application advice is a material consideration of modest weight. It does not bind the authority, and it cannot create an entitlement to permission, because the decision belongs to the local planning authority and may be taken by a committee that disagrees with its officers.

Where it does work hard is in the narrative. A scheme that follows officer advice point by point, set out as such in the Planning Statement, is harder to refuse and much harder to defend refusing at appeal. Inspectors notice when an applicant has done what the authority asked and been refused anyway, and they notice the opposite too.

On viability-led schemes the pre-application stage is also when the appraisal conversation starts. Settling the format an appraisal should arrive in early avoids a late dispute about inputs, and the authority will usually tell you at pre-application whether it intends to commission an independent review of the appraisal and who pays for it.

Where advice stops being reliable

Four things undo it.

Policy moves. A local plan adopted between the advice and the application changes the statutory starting point under section 38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, and so does a new edition of the Framework. The Framework was reissued in August 2026 with policy-coded chapters, so advice written against older paragraph numbering needs rereading.

Consultees turn up late. Written advice given without the highway authority's input is routinely contradicted by the highway authority's consultation response.

Officers change. Case officers move on, and the successor is not bound by the predecessor's view.

And committees depart from recommendations. Where local opposition is likely, ask at pre-application whether the application will be determined under delegated powers or by committee, because the answer tells you how much the officer's view is worth.

Making the submission earn the fee

The quality of the answer tracks the quality of the question. Send a short covering note that states what you are proposing, in numbers, and asks three to six specific questions. Attach a location plan, a site plan with levels, a constraints plan, photographs and sketch drawings at a scale that shows the massing. Say what you have already assumed about the policy position, so the officer can correct it rather than restate it.

Then price the advice into the fee proposal honestly. For an architect, pre-application work is often the difference between a validated application and six weeks of correspondence about missing documents, and clients accept the cost when they can see what it avoids. See PlanScope pricing if you want to put a figure on the supporting documents alongside the authority's charge.

One honest limitation: on a contentious site, no amount of paid advice tells you what a committee will do. The advice tells you what the officer will recommend, which is a different question.

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.