Planning permission for flats.

The ten-dwelling threshold is written for dwellinghouses, and the order says a dwellinghouse does not include a building containing flats. A flatted scheme is major on the face of the order once it creates 1,000 square metres of floorspace or sits on a site of a hectare or more. In practice councils treat ten or more flats as major residential anyway, so plan for the major timetable, the major fee and the higher chance of a committee.

The clock starts at validation, not submission, so an incomplete application never starts it at all. Separately, the planning guarantee is government policy that no application should spend more than a year with decision-makers: twenty-six weeks for major applications and sixteen for the rest. It does not replace the statutory limits, and the sixteen-week figure for an environmental statement is often wrongly given as twenty-six.

There is no half-hectare trigger anywhere in the environmental impact assessment regulations. For urban development projects the indicative figures are more than 150 dwellings, a site of five hectares, or a hectare of development that is not dwellings, and those are thresholds for screening rather than automatic requirements. A site inside or near a designated sensitive area is screened more readily, but conservation areas, listed buildings and Green Belt are not sensitive areas for this purpose, which surprises people on urban heritage sites.

Since 6 August 2026 the exemption is an area test measured to the red line: 0.2 hectares or below, and no impact on an onsite priority habitat. Both conditions have to be met, and the number of homes does not decide it. Small sites were never exempt before that date; they were on a simplified metric. Government has consulted on a wider exemption for smaller residential brownfield sites, but that consultation closed in June 2026 and has not become law.

The nationally described space standard sets 39 square metres for a one-bedroom, one-person flat, dropping to 37 where a shower room replaces the bathroom. For a planning application that standard applies only where the local plan has adopted it, following an assessment of need and viability. For a home created under permitted development it is different again: 37 square metres is a hard national floor, and a flat below it cannot be created that way at all.

National guidance is that the price paid for land is not a justification for failing to comply with policy, and that a scheme complying with all relevant policies should be assumed to be viable. Where abnormal costs are genuine, and brownfield sites often carry real ones in remediation, demolition and ground conditions, they are capable of being taken into account. What carries the argument is a site-specific appraisal prepared before the application, not a negotiation opened after a refusal.

In the twelve months to March 2026 the Planning Inspectorate's median decision times were about twenty weeks for written representations, twenty-four for a hearing and twenty-nine for an inquiry. Against a refusal on a design or amenity ground, a redesign and a fresh application is often faster and more certain than an appeal, because it removes the reason for refusal instead of arguing about it. Where the refusal turns on a point of policy principle, an appeal is the better instrument.