Your build starts when conditions clear.

Which conditions stop you, and how each one comes off.

Reviewed August 2026

The short answer

A permission carries conditions, and some must be cleared before work starts on site. Clearing one means applying to the council for written approval. Start before a pre-commencement condition is discharged and the development is unlawful.

In practice · Ashlawn Road

One condition, and a bat roost

The clearest way to see what a condition does is to watch one come off.

The order of work

01Survey firstRoost potential assessed before the application went in.

02Take the conditionPermission granted with the ecology work held over.

03Submit the detailsA separate application, with its own reference.

04Clear the dateApproved well inside the council's own target.

A house on Ashlawn Road in Rugby, extended to the side and rear, with a protected species living in its roof.

The job

Site: A private house on Ashlawn Road, Rugby, with a bat roost in the roof
Role: Architect and agent, to RIBA Stage 4 only
Council: Rugby Borough Council, refs R24/0879 and R25/0218
Outcome: The ecology condition discharged 1 April 2025, twenty-three days ahead of target

A preliminary roost assessment in the spring of 2024 found the roof had high potential. Surveys across that summer confirmed a brown long-eared bat using it as an occasional day roost. All of that was done before the application was made, which is the decision the rest of this depends on.

Permission was granted on 18 December 2024. A protected species does not usually stop a householder scheme; it puts a condition on it. Here the ecology work was held over to condition 4, and condition 4 was pre-commencement: the development permitted could not commence until a schedule of bat mitigation measures had been submitted to the council and approved.

Those details went in as an application in its own right, with its own reference and its own fee, and were validated on 28 February 2025. The council approved them on 1 April, twenty-three days ahead of its own target date. A licence from Natural England followed in May, through its accelerated route.

Twenty-three days of margin came out of one decision taken a year earlier. The evidence the condition would ask for already existed on the day the condition was written.

Protected species sit on top of a separate licensing regime, and the two run on different tracks. A planning permission authorises development; it does not authorise anything a wildlife licence would otherwise forbid. Both have to land, and neither substitutes for the other, so a condition satisfied by the council still leaves the licence to secure.

The order is the transferable part. Survey seasons do not move to suit a programme. Bat work has a window, so a scheme that waits for the decision notice before commissioning the survey can lose most of a year to a condition that was always going to be imposed.

The proof

Conditions cleared on four sites.

Contamination · approved

Meadow Lane, Nottingham

A former dairy site in Nottingham, redeveloped. Eight sets of details were submitted and approved against the conditions on that permission across 2021, 2022 and 2023, ending with verification that the ground and groundwater contamination had actually been remediated. The permission itself was not a Rickett Architects consent. All eight discharge applications were.

Nottingham City Council refs 21/01439/PDS4, 22/00307/PDS4, 22/00942/PDS4, 22/01677/PDS4, 22/01685/PDS4, 23/00746/PDS4, 23/01151/PDS4 and 23/01477/PDS4

Protected species · approved

Barby Wood Farm

A farmhouse refurbished and its brick and stone outbuildings converted into it. Two conditions on the permission dealt with wildlife: one required a district licence for great crested newts, the other an ecology scheme. Each was discharged on an application of its own, not on one.

West Northamptonshire Council refs 2025/1415/COND and 2025/3075/COND

Two conditions · approved

Foleshill Road, Coventry

Two conditions on the same permission, cleared separately: the detailed drawings under condition 9, and the construction management plan under condition 8. Two conditions, two applications, two fees. Nothing about holding one permission makes the details on it a single piece of work. The consent here was another party's. The discharges were not.

Coventry City Council refs PL/2022/0000069/DCA and PL/2022/0000149/DCA

Condition and obligation

A scheme at Brackley

Conditions cleared one at a time on a single permission: external lighting, contamination validation, cycle parking, surface water drainage, a travel plan contact, a landscape maintenance strategy. A further application discharged a clause of the section 106 agreement instead. An obligation is not a condition and does not come off the same way.

West Northamptonshire Council refs S/2020/1131/COND, S/2020/1277/COND, S/2020/1491/COND, S/2020/1492/COND, S/2020/1540/COND, S/2021/0148/COND and S/2020/1938/106CD

Every planning application we make in our own name is a matter of public record on a council register. Ninety-two of ours have discharged details required by a condition on a planning permission, across seventeen planning authorities.

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The first step

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01 · Where you stand

First, find which conditions bite

Conditions are not a single category and they do not all stop the same thing. The decision notice sorts them for you if you read the first clause of each rather than the subject. What matters is the moment the condition attaches to.

A pre-commencement condition is the one that stops the site. National guidance identifies it by its opening words, and the examples it gives are no development shall take place until, and prior to any works starting on site. Everything the condition asks for has to be submitted and approved before a spade goes in the ground.

The rest are gentler. Some bite before occupation, so the building can go up while they are being settled. Some run for the life of the development, hours of use or a restriction on what the building may be used for, and are never discharged at all because there is nothing to submit. If none of yours opens with the pre-commencement wording, the hard warning further down this page is not aimed at you, and the remaining conditions can be cleared as the programme reaches them.

Guidance is unusually direct about how sparingly the pre-commencement kind should be used. It should only appear where there is clear justification, which is likely to mean the requirement is so fundamental to what has been permitted that the alternative would have been to refuse the whole application. A condition holding up a start for something that could have waited is not doing the job the framework describes.

That has a practical edge. The tests a condition has to meet sit in the framework itself, and guidance says in terms that a pre-commencement condition failing the legal and policy tests may be found unlawful by the courts, and cannot then be enforced if it is breached. That is not a licence to ignore one. It is a reason to argue about the wording before the permission is issued rather than after.

02 · The routes

Four ways a condition comes off

The first of these happens before the permission is granted, and it is the one almost nobody uses. The other three happen afterwards, when the choices are narrower.

Route 01

Agree it before it lands

Permission may not be granted subject to a pre-commencement condition without the applicant's written agreement to its terms. Where agreement has not been reached the authority serves notice of what it proposes, and the applicant has ten working days. Respond substantively inside that window and the condition cannot be imposed. Stay silent and it can.

Where it fails: it does not reach an outline permission, and an authority that cannot impose the condition may refuse the application instead.

Route 02

Apply to discharge it

The ordinary route, and the one the rest of this page is about. A written application identifying the permission and enclosing the details the condition asks for. The authority has to give notice of its decision inside a set period, and where it approves, that condition is discharged.

Where it fails: it does not reach reserved matters, a prior approval, or a biodiversity gain plan, each of which runs to a route of its own.

Route 03

Deemed discharge

Where the authority lets its period run out without deciding, the applicant can serve a deemed discharge notice and the approval is then treated as given. The notice cannot be served until six weeks after the application arrived, unless a shorter period is agreed, and it takes effect no earlier than fourteen days after it is received, and never before the authority's own period has run out.

Where it fails: eleven classes are exempt, and they include contamination, flooding, highways and archaeology.

Route 04

Appeal it

A refusal to give an approval that a condition requires carries a right of appeal to the Secretary of State, and so does a failure to decide at all. It is the route with the most force behind it, and unlike a deemed discharge notice it reaches every class of condition.

Where it fails: it moves the decision out of the authority's hands and out of your programme.

03 · The warning

What happens if you start anyway

National guidance puts it in a single sentence: development carried out without having complied with a pre-commencement condition would be unlawful and may be the subject of enforcement action. Not the condition. The development.

The instrument that follows is a breach of condition notice. An authority may serve one on whoever is carrying out the development, or on whoever has control of the land, setting out the steps it considers ought to be taken and allowing at least twenty-eight days for them. Ignore it after that and an offence has been committed.

Here is the part that surprises people. There is no appeal against a breach of condition notice. Not to the authority, and not to the Secretary of State. What remains is to comply, to challenge the notice in the courts, or to run one of two defences at the point of prosecution: that all reasonable measures were taken to secure compliance, or that control of the land had already passed.

That absence of an appeal is deliberate. The condition it enforces was itself appealable when the permission was granted, and can be challenged again by applying to vary or remove it, so the argument has already had two forums. What the notice does is close the third.

The counterweight is real, though, and it belongs in the same paragraph. A condition that fails the tests may be unlawful, and an unlawful condition cannot be enforced. So the answer to a condition that looks unreasonable is never to build through it and hope. It is to get the wording changed while there is still an instrument that can change it.

Common questions

Discharging conditions, answered

How long does a council have to discharge a condition?

Eight weeks, beginning with the day after the application arrives, unless a longer period is agreed in writing.

That period is set by the Development Management Procedure Order and it covers an application for an approval that a condition requires. It does not cover an application to approve reserved matters, one made under the permitted development order, or the submission of a biodiversity gain plan, each of which runs to a period of its own. If twelve weeks pass without the written confirmation being given, the fee has to be returned, which is a separate obligation from the decision and does not mean the condition has been discharged. Nothing in the eight weeks obliges an authority to say yes. It obliges it to answer.

What does it cost to discharge planning conditions?

A fee for each request rather than for each condition, so several conditions on one application cost the same as one.

Two rates apply, a lower one for householder permissions and a higher one for everything else, and both are set nationally rather than by the authority. They are uprated every April in line with the consumer prices index, capped at ten per cent, so a figure copied out of an old fee schedule is unlikely to be the figure payable now. The fee has to be paid when the request is made and cannot be paid afterwards. Where the authority has not given the written confirmation inside twelve weeks it has to return the fee.

Can part of a condition be discharged?

In practice yes. Authorities routinely determine an application that clears part of a condition and leaves the rest open.

It is a working arrangement rather than a category the legislation creates, so it depends on the authority and on how the condition is written. Where it is available it is worth using, because a single condition covering several unrelated things, external materials alongside roofing and railings for instance, can otherwise hold up a whole phase while one item is resolved. The practical test is whether the part being submitted can be judged on its own. Ask the case officer before splitting one, because a part discharge the authority does not recognise is a fee spent on an application it will not determine.

What is a Grampian condition?

A condition worded negatively, so that development cannot proceed until something happens on land the applicant does not control.

A condition requiring work on land outside the applicant's control usually fails the tests of reasonableness and enforceability, because the applicant cannot be made to do what somebody else has to allow. The negative form gets round that. It does not require the work; it prohibits the development until the work has been done. National guidance accepts them, with one limit that matters: they should not be used where there is no prospect at all of the thing in question happening inside the time the permission allows. A condition that can never be satisfied is a refusal written in the language of an approval.

What is the difference between a condition and a section 106 obligation?

A condition is imposed on the permission by the authority. An obligation is a deed, and it binds the land.

The tests differ too. A condition has to meet six: necessary, relevant to planning, relevant to the development to be permitted, enforceable, precise, and reasonable in all other respects. An obligation has to meet three: necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms, directly related to the development, and fairly and reasonably related to it in scale and kind. National guidance says that where the same objective could be achieved either way, the authority should use a condition. An obligation is enforceable by injunction, and against anyone deriving title from the person who entered into it, and what it requires is dealt with through the agreement rather than by an application under the permission.

What if a condition cannot be met?

Then a discharge application is the wrong instrument. The condition itself has to change, and that is a different application.

An application to discharge asks the authority to accept the details a condition requires. It does not ask the authority to change what the condition requires. Where the requirement is the problem, because the site turned out differently or because the wording captures more than anyone intended, the route is an application to vary or remove that condition, which is decided on the conditions alone. It carries its own form and its own fee, and it is the application most often asked for by the wrong name. Until it is granted the original permission stands and every condition on it still has to be met.

Do planning conditions pass to a new owner?

Yes. A permission enures for the benefit of the land, so its conditions bind whoever owns it next.

That is why an undischarged condition is a due-diligence item and not a previous owner's problem. Buying a site with a live consent means buying its conditions, including any that had to be cleared before work began and were not. It runs the other way as well: details already approved under a condition stay approved, and the approval attaches to the land rather than to the person who obtained it. Ask for the discharge decisions alongside the permission, because a decision notice on its own does not tell you which of its conditions have already been dealt with.

Written by

Rickett Architects

A RIBA Chartered practice, working since 1970, with more than 2,500 projects behind it. Our senior architects take projects from first survey through planning to completion, for private clients, developers and landowners across the Midlands and well beyond it.

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