Statutory undertaker permitted development: Parts 13 and 15

Statutory undertaker permitted development rights belong to the undertaker, not to you. Parts 13 and 15 of Schedule 2 to the General Permitted Development Order 2015 let water undertakers, sewerage undertakers, drainage bodies and electricity undertakers carry out a wide range of works without applying for planning permission. A developer who builds the same substation or pumping station on their own land, in their own name, has no such right.

That distinction decides how you programme utilities on a site. Get the ownership and the sequence right and a connection happens under the undertaker's own rights. Get it wrong and you are adding a planning application to the critical path of a scheme that was supposed to be on site in March.

What Part 13 gives water and sewerage undertakers

Part 13 covers development by water undertakers, sewerage undertakers and drainage bodies. The broad shape of the rights is the laying, altering and repairing of mains, pipes and associated apparatus, works for the inspection, repair or renewal of existing apparatus, and the erection of buildings, plant and machinery on land already held as operational land for the purposes of the undertaking.

The limits are set out in the Part itself and they are specific about height, floor area and position relative to the boundary of the operational land. Read them in the Order rather than relying on a summary, including a summary like this one, because the conditions attached to each Class are where applications go wrong.

Drainage bodies acting under land drainage powers have their own Class, which matters on rural sites where a watercourse or an ordinary watercourse consent is in play. A land drainage consent from the lead local flood authority is a separate permission from planning and neither substitutes for the other.

What Part 15 gives electricity undertakers

Part 15 deals with power related development. An electricity undertaker can install, inspect, repair and alter electric lines, including overhead lines and the supports they sit on, and can carry out works for the purposes of its undertaking on operational land within stated limits. Substations, switching stations and cable sealing end compounds fall into this territory.

The practical boundary is voltage and scale. Overhead electric lines above the thresholds in the Electricity Act 1989 need consent under section 37 of that Act, which is a separate regime run by the Secretary of State rather than by the local planning authority, and large lines and generating stations fall into the nationally significant infrastructure process with a development consent order. None of those routes is planning permission under the 1990 Act, and a planning officer cannot grant or refuse them.

The operational land trap

Most of these rights are tied to operational land. Section 263 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 defines it as land used for the purposes of carrying on the undertaking, and section 264 restricts when land that an undertaker has merely acquired counts.

So a distribution network operator who takes a lease over a 15 by 15 metre plot inside your site does not instantly acquire Part 15 rights over it. The land has to be, or become, operational land in the statutory sense. In practice this is handled by including the substation in the planning application for the development, then transferring the completed structure, which is tidier than arguing about section 264 afterwards.

The same logic applies to a foul pumping station that a sewerage undertaker will eventually adopt. Until adoption, it is your structure on your land, and the authority will expect to see it on the layout with its own access, odour control and noise assessment. That is the point at which a foul sewage assessment earns its place in the submission, because it establishes the destination and the capacity before the pumping station is designed around it.

Consents that sit alongside planning

A single connection can touch four or five regimes. The ones that most often surprise a developer are the water and sewerage statutory powers, because they carry fixed procedures and cost allocations.

A build-over agreement for a public sewer is a separate undertaker consent again, and it is not unusual for it to force a foundation redesign after planning permission has been granted. Check the sewer records before the layout is fixed, not after.

How these rights change a development programme

Three effects recur on sites of 10 to 100 units.

The first is diversion lead time. A section 185 diversion of a trunk main is designed and delivered by the undertaker to its own programme, and that programme is frequently measured in quarters rather than weeks. The right to require the diversion does not come with a right to require it quickly.

The second is that the undertaker's permitted development rights can run across land you do not control. A new cable route to serve your site may be installed under Part 15 through a neighbour's field with a wayleave, with no application and no consultation that you can influence. Useful when it works for you. Awkward when the chosen route crosses the part of the site you had earmarked for a sales suite.

The third is designated land. In National Parks, National Landscapes, conservation areas and World Heritage Sites, several of these rights are narrowed or made subject to prior approval. A rural scheme that needs a new overhead line to reach it should establish the designation position before the layout assumes an easy connection, and the same caution applies to rural conversions where the whole viability case depends on a low cost connection, as the evidence problems in proving a barn was in agricultural use show in a different context.

Where you have to apply instead

You will need planning permission, in your own name, for a substation or pumping station you build and own before any transfer, for a package treatment plant serving the development, for private water storage or borehole infrastructure, for a district heating energy centre, and for any compound or plant that is not for the purposes of a statutory undertaking at all.

Illustrative example, not a real scheme: a 48 dwelling site needs a new 11 kV substation, a foul pumping station and a 90 metre water main diversion. The substation and pumping station go on the planning layout and into the application, with the substation shown with a 2.4 metre high enclosure and the pumping station set back from the nearest plot with an odour and noise note. The diversion proceeds under section 185 with no planning application at all, because the undertaker carries it out under Part 13. One application, three pieces of infrastructure, two different legal routes.

Set this out plainly in the submission. A utilities assessment that names each connection, states who will build it, under which power, and when, answers questions the case officer would otherwise raise at week six. And the same material belongs in the planning statement where the scheme depends on infrastructure that is not part of the application.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. A Lawful Development Certificate under section 192 of the 1990 Act is the only formal way to confirm that proposed works are lawful without permission.

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