Site location plans councils accept: scale, red line and north point

A site location plan for a planning application is the drawing that tells the council exactly which piece of land you are asking about. Get it wrong and nothing else in the submission matters, because the application is held as invalid before an officer reads a word of your statement. The requirements are narrow and they barely change between councils: a scaled Ordnance Survey based extract, a red line around the application site, a blue line around other land you control nearby, a north point and enough named roads to find the place.

This is general guidance, not legal advice, and every local planning authority publishes its own validation list. Check yours before you order drawings.

The scale and content councils require

Most English councils ask for 1:1250 for a site in a town or suburb and 1:2500 for a rural site or a larger holding. The ratio has to be stated on the drawing, along with the paper size it was set up for. A plan printed at 1:1250 on A4 and then reduced to fit A5 is no longer at 1:1250, and officers do check.

The map underneath must be Ordnance Survey based and current. Plan suppliers licensed by Ordnance Survey sell single-use extracts for a few pounds, which is what almost every householder buys. Mapping copied from a consumer navigation website is not licensed for this purpose and is refused as a matter of routine.

What the plan has to show, beyond the site itself, is context. At least two named roads. The surrounding buildings, with their numbers where the map carries them. Enough of the neighbouring pattern that someone who has never been to the street can stand in front of the right house.

Drawing the red line and the blue line

The red line encloses all the land needed to carry out the development. That is a wider test than "the bit being built on". If the scheme relies on a new access, the access goes inside the red line. If a visibility splay across your front garden is part of the proposal, that goes in too. So does any land where levels are being changed, drainage run or a tree removed.

The blue line marks other land in the same ownership or control immediately adjoining or near the site. It is not decoration. Councils use it to work out whether a neighbouring parcel could have taken the development instead, and to check the ownership certificate on the form is right.

Two rules save most of the trouble. Draw the red line as a continuous closed outline, not a dashed or hatched band. And never let the red and blue lines touch or overlap, because an overlapping boundary reads as a contradiction about what land is being applied for.

Where you do not own the whole red line area, you cannot simply avoid the problem by shrinking the line. You serve notice on the other owner and complete Certificate B rather than Certificate A on the application form. The certificate and the red line have to tell the same story.

North points, road names and scale bars

Three annotations account for a large share of invalidation letters, and all three take a minute to add.

The north point must be on the drawing and pointing the right way. Officers use it when they read your daylight and overshadowing arguments, so a north arrow rotated to suit the sheet layout is worse than none at all.

A scale bar is better than a stated ratio alone, because it survives photocopying and PDF resizing. Include both. Add the drawing number, the revision letter and the date, and change the revision letter every time you reissue. An officer holding two files both called "location plan" will pick the wrong one.

Road names come from the base mapping, but check them. Newly built streets and recently renamed roads often lag on older map extracts, and a plan naming a road that no longer exists invites a query you do not need.

Block plans and the drawings that sit behind them

The location plan places the site. The block plan describes it. For a householder application the block plan is usually 1:200 or 1:500 and shows the existing and proposed footprint, the boundary treatment, where the bins and cycles go, the parking layout and, increasingly, where surface water will drain.

Behind those two sit the existing and proposed floor plans and elevations, normally at 1:50 or 1:100. Submit an existing drawing for every proposed one. A proposed rear elevation with no existing counterpart forces the officer to guess what changed, and officers who have to guess ask questions instead of recommending approval.

Where a Design and Access Statement is required, usually for listed building consent or in a conservation area, it should refer to the same drawing numbers. Consistent numbering across the form, the plans and the statements is the quiet marker of a submission that has been checked.

Drawing errors that get applications invalidated

The errors repeat across councils, which is oddly reassuring, because it means the list is short.

1. The red line stops at the building and leaves out the access or the parking that the scheme depends on.
2. The blue line is missing entirely on a site where the applicant owns the field or the garden next door.
3. No north point, or a north point that contradicts the block plan.
4. The scale is stated but the drawing has been resized, so a measured check does not match.
5. Only one road is named, or none, on a plan of a cul-de-sac.
6. The mapping is an unlicensed screenshot.
7. Drawing numbers on the plans do not match the numbers listed on the application form.

Any one of these puts the file in the validation queue rather than the case officer's tray. That matters more than it sounds, because the determination period does not start until the application is valid, and it also affects whether a case officer or a committee decides it if the timetable slips past a committee cycle.

Sites with no road frontage

Backland plots, farm holdings and houses reached by a shared track need a bit more thought. The red line should extend along the private access to the point where it meets the adopted highway, because that access is part of the land required to carry out the development. If the track is shared, you will usually need Certificate B and notice served on the other owners.

Add a written note on the plan describing the access route, and mark the adopted highway boundary if your mapping shows it. On rural sites at 1:2500 the highway authority also wants to see the visibility in each direction from the junction, which often means a separate access drawing at a larger scale.

The same care pays off on constrained sites generally, including Green Belt sites where the extent of the residential curtilage inside the red line is itself a policy question. Draw the curtilage as it is, not as you would like it to be. An overstated red line on a Green Belt plot has a habit of coming back at appeal.

Once the drawings are settled, the supporting documents are the next hurdle, and which ones the council expects depends on the site rather than the size of the job. You can enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which reports your site is likely to need before you order anything.

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