Schedule of accommodation for a planning application

A schedule of accommodation planning officers can check in five minutes does three things: it states which measurement convention you used, it gives existing, proposed and net figures for every unit, and it reconciles with the drawings, the application form and the fee. Most schedules fail on the first of those. An area is written down with no convention named, the officer measures the drawing, gets a different number, and the application stalls while two people argue about whether the stair enclosure counts.

This is a validation and checking document. Treat it as accounting rather than design narrative.

What the schedule has to reconcile with

Four other documents contain floor areas, and each one is checked against your schedule by a different person.

The drawings are the first. Every unit area on the schedule must be reproducible from the scaled plan by someone who measures it themselves. The application form is the second: the gross internal floorspace fields and the unit numbers on the form feed the fee calculation, and a mismatch triggers an invalid application rather than a query. The fee calculation itself is the third, because fees for most non-residential development are banded by floorspace created and a small error can move you across a band.

The fourth is the levy. Where the council has a charging schedule, the liable floorspace is measured as gross internal area of new build with deductions for qualifying existing buildings, so the same figures resurface months later on the liability notice. Getting the existing area wrong is expensive in a way that getting the proposed area wrong is not. The mechanics of that deduction are set out in how a CIL charge is calculated for a new dwelling.

Measurement conventions and saying which one you used

State the convention in a line above the table. Something as plain as "All areas are gross internal area measured in accordance with the RICS code of measuring practice" removes most of the argument.

Gross internal area is measured to the internal face of the external wall and includes internal walls and partitions, structural columns, service risers, internal lobbies and the area occupied by stairs measured at each level. It excludes external walls, open external balconies, and any space with a headroom below the relevant threshold where you say so. Net internal area is a different measure, used mainly for commercial lettings, and putting it in a planning schedule without saying so is how a 74 m² house becomes a 68 m² house.

Three conventions worth stating explicitly because councils differ:

• How you have treated sloping ceilings in loft rooms, and the height below which area is discounted.
• Whether communal circulation in a flatted block is included in unit areas (it should not be) and whether it appears as a separate line (it should).
• Whether integral garages and stores are inside or outside the dwelling area.

Round to one decimal place and do not round twice. A schedule that totals to a number different from the sum of its rows is the single most common reason an officer stops trusting the document.

Unit mix, bedspaces and occupancy

Housing policy is written in bedspaces, not bedrooms. A 2 bed 3 person flat and a 2 bed 4 person flat are different products, they sit against different space standards, and they count differently in an affordable housing mix.

So the unit mix table needs a bedspace column. Derive it from the bedrooms as drawn: a room of at least 7.5 m² and 2.15 m wide is a single bedspace, a room of at least 11.5 m² and 2.75 m wide is a double, and at least one double must be 2.75 m wide in dwellings designed for two or more people. If your drawing shows a bedroom of 11.5 m² that is only 2.4 m wide, it is a single and your schedule should say so, whatever the marketing intends.

Tenure belongs in the mix table where the scheme includes affordable housing, because the officer preparing the Affordable Housing Statement assessment will otherwise build their own version of your table and it will not match.

Comparing against the space standard

Where the local plan has adopted the nationally described space standard, the schedule should carry a compliance column rather than leaving the officer to look the figures up.

The standard sets minimum gross internal areas by bedrooms and bedspaces, starting at 39 m² for a one bedroom one person dwelling, 50 m² for one bedroom two person, 61 m² and 70 m² for two bedroom dwellings at three and four bedspaces, and 74 m² for a three bedroom four person home. It also sets built-in storage minimums and requires a floor to ceiling height of at least 2.3 m over most of the area. A unit that meets the area but fails the storage still fails.

Two points that catch people out. The standard applies through the local plan, so it only bites where the authority has adopted it as a policy requirement, and a handful of authorities apply their own higher figures in London and elsewhere. And the standard is a minimum for the whole dwelling measured as gross internal area, so a scheme that hits the total while squeezing a bedroom below the room minimum has not complied. The detail of that comparison is worked through in measuring gross internal area against the space standard.

Existing, proposed and net change

Every schedule on a scheme involving demolition, conversion or extension needs three columns, and the third is the one that matters.

Existing means the lawful floorspace as it stands, measured on the same convention. Proposed means the completed development. Net change is the arithmetic difference, and it is what drives the fee band, the levy calculation, the affordable housing threshold and in many plans the parking requirement.

Where existing buildings are being demolished, add a line saying whether they have been in lawful use for a continuous period, because that determines whether their area can be deducted from the levy. Where an existing building is only partly retained, show retained and demolished separately rather than netting them off in your head.

A worked illustrative layout for a small scheme of three houses replacing a bungalow:

Figures above are illustrative only. The point of the layout is that a reader can add the columns and check the totals without opening a drawing.

Arithmetic that officers find

Officers are not auditing you, but they do spot the same handful of errors.

Stair area counted once in a two-storey house rather than at each level. Communal corridor area shared out between flats so that each unit looks compliant. A bay window included in the plan area but excluded from the schedule. The existing garage that was converted years ago without permission and is now claimed as lawful existing floorspace. Totals that carry a rounding error of a square metre or two, which reads as carelessness even when it changes nothing.

And one that costs money: the unit count on the form not matching the schedule, which pushes the application into the wrong fee band and, on schemes near ten units, across the threshold at which affordable housing and other requirements bite.

Putting it in front of the officer

Submit the schedule as its own named document rather than burying it in the Design and Access Statement. Officers download documents individually and a table inside a 30 page design narrative gets missed.

Name it plainly, date it, and give it a revision code that matches the drawing revision it was measured from. When the drawings change during determination, reissue the schedule with the same revision suffix as the drawings. That single habit prevents the situation where a permission is granted against plans that no longer agree with the approved schedule, and the discharge of conditions six months later turns into a section 73 application.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check your council's validation checklist and its adopted space standards policy before you submit. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which supporting documents your scheme is likely to need.