Reports needed for a glamping or camping business

A glamping or camping business on farmland almost always needs full planning permission, and the glamping planning reports a council will ask for are driven less by the pods than by drainage, access and landscape character. Permitted development gives you a short temporary use each calendar year and little else. Once units stay put through a season, you are in the planning system proper, and the application is judged against your adopted local plan's rural tourism and countryside policies alongside the National Planning Policy Framework (edition published 17 August 2026).

So the useful question is not which pod to buy. It is which pieces of evidence will decide the application.

Permitted temporary use and where it runs out

Part 4 Class B of the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015 allows land to be used temporarily for most purposes for a limited number of days in each calendar year, with a lower limit for markets and motor racing. That day limit has been amended more than once since 2015, so read the current text of Class B rather than a summary of it. Structures brought onto the land and removed again within the period are covered by the same permission.

Three things commonly break the Class B route. Leaving anything in place out of season is the first: a hardstanding, a service pedestal, a composting toilet block. Counting days per pitch instead of per parcel of land is the second, and it is simply wrong. The third is forgetting that the allowance is shared with every other temporary use of that same land in the same year, so a wedding field and a camping field cannot each have a full run of days.

Two further points of law sit behind this. Use of land as a caravan site has its own permissions in Part 5 of the same Order, tied to the exemptions in Schedule 1 to the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960. And none of these routes confirm anything formally: a lawful development certificate under section 191 or 192 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 is the only way to settle whether what you are doing is lawful.

Whether pods are caravans, buildings or neither

Section 29(1) of the 1960 Act defines a caravan as a structure designed or adapted for human habitation that is capable of being moved from one place to another, whether by towing or by transport on a vehicle. A shepherd's hut on cast iron wheels usually qualifies. A twin-unit lodge qualifies only within the dimensions set by section 13 of the Caravan Sites Act 1968 as amended, and only if it is assembled on site from two sections.

The classification changes the application. Siting caravans is a material change of use of land, so you apply for use of land as a caravan site, and the site will also need a site licence from the council once permission exists. A pod bolted to a concrete raft, plumbed in and skirted is a building, and erecting it is development under section 55 of the 1990 Act.

Case officers look at permanence rather than at the brochure. Wheels that have never turned, a timber deck, a mains spur and a permanent fence all point the same way.

Foul drainage for dispersed units

Drainage is where glamping applications are most often held up, because the units are scattered and the flows are seasonal. Mains connection is rare on these sites. Most schemes rely on a package treatment plant or a septic tank, which brings in the Environment Agency general binding rules for small sewage discharges. A discharge to ground of up to 2 cubic metres a day, or to surface water of up to 5 cubic metres a day, can sit within those rules if the other conditions are met. Above either figure you need an environmental permit, and the planning application should say so.

Peak occupancy drives the sizing, not average occupancy. A council will expect a Foul Sewage Assessment covering population equivalent at full occupancy, the receiving ground conditions, percolation test results to BS 6297 and the distance to any watercourse, well or borehole. Compost toilets reduce the load but do not remove the need to show where grey water goes, and a Foul Sewage Assessment that ignores shower and kitchen waste will come back with a holding objection from the drainage officer.

Where water comes from a spring or borehole rather than the mains, the evidence set widens again, and our guide to reports for a scheme with a private water supply covers the testing a council and its environmental health team will look for.

Access, visibility and rural lanes

Highway authorities treat a tourism site on a single track lane as a trip generation question, and they are right to. The assessment usually needs visibility splays measured in both directions from the access, set against the measured eighty-fifth percentile approach speed rather than the speed limit, using the geometry in Manual for Streets. Passing bay provision, gate set-back, and whether the first few metres can be surfaced to stop mud tracking onto the carriageway all come up.

For a small site a Transport Statement is usually enough. Arrival and departure patterns matter more than daily totals, because changeover days concentrate movements into a few hours. Include the turning circle for a refuse vehicle if bins are collected on site, and say where delivery vans and any site vehicle will stand.

Dark skies, lighting and landscape character

Lighting is the quiet reason schemes in a National Landscape or National Park get refused. The policy test is landscape and visual effect, and intrinsic dark skies are part of that character. A Lighting Assessment following the Institution of Lighting Professionals guidance on obtrusive light should set out environmental zone, lux limits at the site boundary, upward light ratio, colour temperature and curfew hours.

Low bollards with full cut-off optics, warm colour temperature below 3000 kelvin, and no lighting at all on pitch perimeters will usually be accepted. Festoon strings across a field will not.

For landscape effect, the proportionate document on a small site is a landscape and visual appraisal rather than a full assessment to the third edition of the Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment. Scale it to the sensitivity of the receptor, and say in the method why you scaled it that way.

Ecology and the loss of grassland

Converting a field to pitches is a habitat change, so biodiversity net gain under the Environment Act 2021 applies to the permission. The statutory metric has to be completed by a competent person, and the biodiversity gain plan is approved by the local planning authority after permission, not before. Semi-improved or species rich grassland scores far higher than it looks on a site walk, and losing it to hardstanding and parking is expensive in metric terms.

Start with a Preliminary Ecological Appraisal and let it tell you whether further survey is needed. If bats are roosting in a barn you intend to convert to a shower block, a Protected Species Survey by a licensed ecologist is legally required under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, and no desk study substitutes for it. A Biodiversity Net Gain Assessment likewise needs a competent person: PlanScope can draft the policy narrative and the structure, and that draft is a starting point for the professional who signs the metric, never a replacement.

Illustrative example

Take a 1.8 hectare paddock on the edge of a village, six shepherd's huts, a timber shower block and parking for eight cars. On that scale the submission that tends to work is a planning statement, a site layout with contours, a foul drainage strategy with percolation results, a transport statement with visibility splays, a preliminary ecological appraisal, a biodiversity metric, and a lighting layout with a curfew. This example is illustrative: your council's local validation list governs.

The document set to submit

Check the list against your authority's own validation checklist before you submit, because local requirements sit on top of the national ones and vary by district.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which of the 66 report types your site is likely to need, or browse them all at the report index.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.