Reworking an England draft for a Welsh application

This article is about applications in Wales. If you hold a planning statement drafted for an English site and the next job is in Powys or Carmarthenshire, the conversion is not a search and replace exercise. Taking an England draft to a Welsh planning application means changing the statutory references, the permitted development order, the use classes, the national policy and several of the documents in the pack. Some English regimes have no Welsh equivalent at all, and Wales has requirements that would be meaningless in England.

The work is worth doing properly, because a Welsh validation officer reads the same checklist every day and recognises an English document immediately.

What changes beyond the policy names

Three categories of change, in descending order of how often they are missed.

Statutory references. Wales applies the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 1995 as amended, not the 2015 England Order. The Use Classes Order as it applies in Wales retains the shopping, business and institutional classes that England replaced with Class E in 2020. Environmental impact assessment runs under the Welsh 2017 regulations. The Planning (Wales) Act 2015 adds procedural requirements that have no English counterpart.

National policy. Planning Policy Wales replaces the National Planning Policy Framework, and the Technical Advice Notes replace Planning Practice Guidance. The vocabulary differs as much as the content: a Welsh statement that does not engage with placemaking and the well-being goals reads as though it was written elsewhere, because it was.

Procedure. Pre-application consultation, sustainable drainage approval and the Developments of National Significance route all change the programme rather than the prose.

The development plan in Wales

The development plan comprises Future Wales: The National Plan 2040, any strategic development plan, and the local development plan for the area. Future Wales is part of the plan itself, which is different from the English arrangement where national policy sits outside the development plan.

Section 38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 still governs the decision, so the plan-led starting point is familiar. What is not familiar is the absence of a five-year housing land supply requirement: the technical advice note on joint housing land availability studies was disapplied in 2020, and there is no Welsh equivalent of the English tilted balance. An England draft that leans on housing land supply arguments has nothing to lean on once it crosses the border.

Add the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. Public bodies work to the sustainable development principle, the seven well-being goals and the five ways of working, and planning decisions in Wales are framed in those terms. Rewriting a sustainability section around the placemaking outcomes in Planning Policy Wales is the single change that does most to make a document read as Welsh.

Technical Advice Notes in place of practice guidance

The Technical Advice Notes carry the detail that Planning Practice Guidance carries in England, and they are not organised the same way. The ones that come up most often in a conversion:

Two cautions. Cite Planning Policy Wales by edition and date, as you would the Framework, because editions change and readers hold older copies. And check which version of TAN 15 applies to your site, since its revision and implementation date have moved more than once and the flood consequences assessment requirements differ between versions.

Documents Wales asks for that England does not

Design and access statements are required for specified development in Wales and are expected to address the design objectives in TAN 12, which is a different structure from the English approach to the same document.

For listed building consent, a heritage impact statement is a specific Welsh requirement flowing from the Historic Environment (Wales) Act 2016, and Cadw publishes guidance on what it should contain. An English heritage statement written around the national policy tests needs restructuring, not relabelling.

For major development, the pre-application consultation report is a validation document. The exercise runs for 28 days before the application is submitted, with a site notice, notice to neighbouring occupiers and the community council, and consultation of specified bodies. The report sets out who was consulted, what they said and how the scheme responded. There is no way to retrofit it, and it is one of the more common reasons a Welsh major is returned. Our note on why applications come back as invalid covers the general pattern.

Where the Welsh language is a consideration, a Welsh language impact assessment may be sought, particularly for larger residential schemes in areas with a high proportion of Welsh speakers. Nothing in an English drafting pack prepares for that.

English regimes that do not exist in Wales

Strike these from the draft entirely:

• Mandatory biodiversity net gain and the statutory biodiversity metric under the Environment Act 2021
• Class MA prior approval for commercial to residential conversion, and the other 2015 Order classes
• Class E of the Use Classes Order, and advice about movement within it
• Permission in principle and brownfield land registers
• National Development Management Policies under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023
• Fire statements under Article 9A of the English Development Management Procedure Order, and Planning Gateway One as it operates in England
• The English Infrastructure Levy powers
• English Part L and the Future Homes Standard, because building regulations are devolved

Each of these appears in English drafting as a matter of course, and each is wrong in a Welsh document. The biodiversity one does the most damage, because an applicant who has been told to budget for a metric calculation and a 30-year management plan has been given the wrong advice about both cost and programme.

Welsh regimes with no English equivalent

• Sustainable drainage approval from the SuDS Approval Body under Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, assessed against the Welsh statutory standards, for most new construction
• Mandatory pre-application consultation for major development, and statutory pre-application services from the authority
• The section 6 biodiversity and resilience duty under the Environment (Wales) Act 2016, with the net benefit expectation in Planning Policy Wales
• Phosphate assessment for development draining to a riverine special area of conservation, following Natural Resources Wales guidance
• The Developments of National Significance route, decided by Welsh Ministers through Planning and Environment Decisions Wales
• Welsh language considerations in plan making and in decisions
• Welsh planning fees, set by separate regulations

The drainage approval is the one that changes a programme. It is a separate consent with its own application, standards and determination period, and construction cannot lawfully begin without it. Treating it as a condition to be discharged later, as a drainage strategy would be in England, puts a start date at risk.

A conversion checklist before submission

1. Replace every statutory reference against the Welsh version of each instrument.
2. Rebuild the policy section around Future Wales, the local development plan and Planning Policy Wales by edition, with the relevant Technical Advice Notes.
3. Delete the English-only regimes listed above, and the cost and programme advice that went with them.
4. Add the Welsh-only requirements, starting with drainage approval and pre-application consultation.
5. Reframe design and sustainability around placemaking, the design objectives and the well-being goals.
6. Check the local authority's own validation list, which in Wales is published alongside the Welsh national requirements.
7. Have the whole document read by someone who practises in Wales before it goes anywhere.

That last step is not optional. PlanScope's drafting is grounded in English policy, the National Planning Policy Framework and English local plans, so a Welsh draft will give you the structure, the section headings and the argument sequence while getting parts of the national policy framework wrong. That is the pattern described in what a draft gets right about structure and wrong about evidence, and the fix is to send it to a reviewer who works in the Welsh system and expect them to rewrite the policy chapter rather than tidy it.

Budget the review time honestly. An English draft converted carefully saves a day of typing. An English draft converted carelessly costs a validation cycle.

Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which report types a scheme is likely to need, then have the Welsh policy position confirmed by your reviewer.

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.