After a refusal, the first thing to do is read the officer’s report (or delegated report). Most people don’t, often because they don’t even know it exists. The decision notice you’re sent gives you a summary of the council’s reasons for refusing, whereas the officer’s report behind it gives you the full assessment: the relevant policies, the material considerations, and the two or three paragraphs where the case officer actually explains why they said no. Oddly, nobody sends it to you, and you aren’t even told it’s there.
Where to find it
Most councils upload the report to their website alongside the decision notice, so start there. Find your application by its reference number and look through the documents. Some councils don’t publish it at all and simply keep it on file, where it may only ever be seen by the line manager who signed the decision off – who may not have read it very thoroughly either. Either way it is public information, sometimes called the ‘delegated report’ where the decision was taken by an officer rather than the committee. If you can’t find it, ask the council or your case officer for a copy. They have to give you one.
What a proper report should do
The report should fully substantiate the council’s position. Say your extension was refused for harming a neighbour’s light. A proper report tells you which neighbour, which window, and how the loss of light comes about. It then asks whether that harm is bad enough to justify refusal, and weighs it against the benefits of your scheme. That last step – the planning balance – is the one a lazy report skips.
Spotting a weak refusal
The report is wordy, but much of it is pro forma, the same boilerplate that appears on every decision. Only a few paragraphs are written specifically about your proposal, so scroll straight to those. That is where a weak refusal gives itself away.
Are the allegations of harm vague and generic, or do they pin down exactly which part of your development causes a problem and how? Look for plain errors too. I have known a case officer object to a loss of light to a neighbour’s dining room window when the window in fact served a downstairs WC. It is rare, but officers do sometimes misunderstand a scheme, assess the wrong property, or get basic facts about the site plain wrong.
And read what the report says about the neighbours. Applicants often arrive convinced that the objections next door are what sank them, when a glance at the report shows the officer gave those objections very little weight. More often than not, most of the proposal was found perfectly acceptable, and a single, fairly narrow issue is all that tripped it up. Find that issue and you have found your appeal.
Turning it into your appeal
Once you know precisely why you were refused, you can decide what to do about it. Under the appeal rules introduced in April 2026, most appeals are decided on the application file alone, with no chance to add new evidence later. So your 250-word summary needs to go straight at the weak paragraph you have found, not the whole report, just the part that doesn’t hold up.
If you were refused over something your application never covered – a highways objection that really needs a consultant’s report, say – a standard written appeal can’t fix it. The honest choice is then a fresh application with the right material in place, or an appeal with a request for a hearing. And if the report makes clear the scheme simply needs to be smaller, it may be quicker to revise and reapply than to fight it.
The officer’s report and the decision notice work together, and it is worth reading both. For the other half of the picture, see our guide to how to read your planning refusal notice.
If you’ve been refused and you want a second opinion on whether the officer’s report actually stands up, send it to us for free initial advice. We’ll read it properly, tell you honestly whether the council’s reasoning holds, and if it doesn’t, we’ll prepare and manage your appeal for a fixed fee of £399.