Validation: national and local list requirements compared

Planning validation requirements sit in two tiers. The first is national and comes from statute, so it applies to every application made to every local planning authority in England. The second is local: a list each authority publishes itself, naming the extra documents it wants for particular kinds of development in its own area. Knowing which tier a demand belongs to is the whole trick, because only one of them is non-negotiable. A case officer asking for a daylight study that appears on neither list is making a request, not enforcing a rule.

Most "your application is invalid" emails blur the two deliberately.

Where the two tiers come from in law

Section 62 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 lets the Secretary of State prescribe the form and content of applications, and separately lets an authority require particulars or evidence it reasonably needs to deal with the application. Section 327A of the same Act does the enforcing: an authority must not entertain an application that fails to comply with those requirements.

The national tier is written out in the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015. That Order fixes the application form, the ownership certificates, the plans, the Design and Access Statement trigger and the fire statement introduced by article 9A.

The local tier rests on the section 62 power plus national guidance. Planning Practice Guidance on making an application expects authorities to publish a local list on their website and keep it under review, so an applicant can see in advance what will be asked. An expectation held only in an officer's head is not a validation requirement at all.

What the national list actually covers

For a straightforward application the national tier comes down to a short set of items:

• the standard application form for the application type, completed and dated
• the correct fee under the current fees regulations
• plans identifying the land, normally a location plan at 1:1250 or 1:2500 with the site edged red
• the ownership certificate (A, B, C or D) and, where land is agricultural, the agricultural holdings certificate
• a Design and Access Statement where the 2015 Order requires one
• a fire statement where the proposal involves a relevant building

The Design and Access Statement trigger catches major development, and also development in a conservation area or World Heritage Site where the proposal is one or more dwellings or 100 m² or more of floorspace. The fire statement trigger under article 9A is narrower and bites on residential buildings of 18 metres or more, or seven or more storeys, containing two or more dwellings. Those are the Planning Gateway One cases, and the Health and Safety Executive is a statutory consultee on them.

Nothing else on this tier is optional, and nothing on it is arguable. Get a certificate wrong and the application is properly invalid, whatever the merits of the scheme.

What a local list may add, and on what basis

A local list is where parking surveys, drainage calculations, contaminated land questionnaires, biodiversity metrics, arboricultural information and heritage statements usually appear, each tied to a trigger such as a floorspace figure, a unit count or a designation. The national validation list, item by item is fixed across England, so the local list is the part that explains why two neighbouring authorities ask for different packs on the same scheme.

Guidance sets two conditions on a local requirement. It has to be reasonable having regard to the nature and scale of the proposal, and the information sought has to be a material consideration in the determination. Both tests are about proportion. A request for a full transport assessment on a two-bedroom flat conversion fails the first, and a request for structural calculations usually fails the second, because structural adequacy is a building regulations question rather than a planning one.

The limits on a local requirement

Local lists are supposed to be reviewed regularly, and guidance is clear that stale or over-broad requirements should not be insisted upon. If the list on the website carries no review date, or names policies that were superseded when the current plan was adopted, say so in writing when you push back.

Three limits come up repeatedly in practice. A requirement must appear on the published list, not in a separate officer guidance note. It must match the trigger stated on the list, so a threshold of ten dwellings does not reach a scheme of nine. And it cannot convert a condition into a validation item, which is what is happening when an authority asks for a detailed drainage design rather than the drainage strategy its own list names.

Scoping is the civilised way through this. The same logic that makes an EIA scoping opinion worth requesting applies at a smaller scale to any contested local item: ask the authority to confirm in writing, before submission, what it needs and why.

When validation goes wrong

There is no statutory appeal against a refusal to validate. The eight or thirteen week determination period does not start until the application is valid, so a stalled validation costs programme time directly.

Four practical moves, roughly in order of escalation. Supply the document if it is inexpensive and you were always going to need it. Write to the validation team quoting the list entry and the trigger, and ask which published requirement the demand rests on. Escalate to the development management team leader where the answer is unsatisfactory. Treat judicial review as the real but last remedy, since the courts have accepted that an authority cannot invalidate an application for want of information it never published.

Keep the correspondence. If the scheme later goes to appeal on delay, the validation history is the evidence that the delay was not yours.

An illustrative example

Illustrative example. An architect submits a nine-dwelling scheme on a cleared industrial yard. The authority invalidates it and asks for a transport assessment, a full arboricultural impact assessment and a viability appraisal. Checking the published list shows the transport assessment trigger set at fifty dwellings, the arboricultural trigger tied to trees within the site or within fifteen metres of it, and viability named only for schemes departing from the affordable housing policy.

The response takes a page. The scheme falls well under the transport trigger, so a transport statement is offered instead. There are no trees within the stated distance, with a dimensioned plan to prove it. The scheme meets the affordable housing policy in full, so viability does not arise. Two of the three demands fall away, and the one that remains is the least costly of the three.

That is the normal outcome when a local list is read properly. Validation is often handled by a different team working from a checklist, and checklists do not read triggers carefully.

Checking the position before you submit

Start from the authority's own planning pages and search for the local list by name, then note its publication or review date. Read the entries for your application type rather than skimming the whole document, because householder, minor and major columns often differ. Where a trigger is ambiguous, pre-application advice is worth the fee for the written answer alone. The same preparation also tells you whether the proposal is operational development under section 55 and so needs an application at all.

Then build the pack to the list, and name each document in your covering letter using the list's own wording. Validation officers match words.

PlanScope's 66 report types are grouped so you can assemble a pack against a validation list rather than guessing at it. Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which reports your site is likely to need.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.