Elmbridge refuses a very large number of planning applications every year. If yours has just been turned down, you can almost always appeal, and the appeal is decided not by the council that refused you but by an independent planning inspector, who has no stake in the original decision and often reaches a different one. A great many of the borough’s refusals come down to little more than a case officer’s opinion of your extension or outbuilding, and opinions are exactly what an inspector is there to review.
If the council has refused your extension, loft, garage, outbuilding or a small new-build scheme, send us the decision notice and your plans and we will give you an honest view, at no charge, on whether it is worth appealing. If it is, we will run the whole appeal for a fixed fee of £399, with no hidden extras, and we win more than half of the appeals we take on.
Is it worth appealing?
That is the first thing to establish, and we will give you a straight answer before you commit to anything. Plenty of refusals are not worth the effort, but a good many that reach us are, because a decision notice written in the council’s own words, citing the council’s own policies, reads very differently once someone independent has stood on the site and judged it against national planning rules. Refusals that seemed solid on paper often do not hold up to that kind of scrutiny.
Nationally, around a third of planning appeals succeed. Ours do better than that, at more than half, in part because we only take on the cases we believe can be won.
Why Elmbridge refuses so much
Elmbridge is the Surrey commuter belt at its most sought-after, a cluster of prosperous towns and villages such as Esher, Weybridge, Cobham, Walton-on-Thames, the Moleseys, Claygate and Oxshott, where large houses on large plots draw a constant stream of extensions, outbuildings, garden rooms and replacement homes. More than half the borough is Green Belt and much of the rest is character-sensitive suburb, so the council rarely struggles to find a reason to say no. Near open country or the Green Belt, expect the objection to be about the openness of the land or the character of the area. In the towns, an extension or loft is more likely to be turned down for its size, for sitting awkwardly in the street, or for taking a neighbour’s light, outlook or privacy. None of those reasons is a hard fact. They are the council’s view of your scheme, and a view is exactly the kind of thing an inspector can overturn.
A couple of recent Elmbridge wins
Two of our recent Elmbridge appeals are worth reading if you are weighing up your own. In Esher, the council refused a small timber outbuilding in a front garden on character grounds and over a nearby protected tree, even though its own conservation officer had said the building did no harm; the inspector allowed it, and you can read the full story here. In Weybridge, it refused a two-storey side extension on the grounds that it would overbear the neighbours and take their light, applying a standard 45-degree light test to a pair of houses it did not fit; that one was overturned too. Between them they cover the two things Elmbridge refuses most, garden buildings said to spoil the street and extensions said to harm a neighbour, and both are exactly the sort of refusal inspectors overturn most often.
What we actually do
Nearly all householder and small-scheme appeals are dealt with in writing rather than at a hearing, so there is nothing for you to attend and no meeting to prepare for. You send us the refusal and the plans; we take the council’s reasons apart one at a time, set out the policies and the facts that answer them, and put the whole case to the inspector, who then visits the site and makes the decision. That written statement is what wins or loses the appeal, and it is what your £399 covers. If you would rather get to grips with the process first, our guide to how to win a planning appeal covers it, and appeal or reapply helps if you cannot decide between the two.
Refused in Elmbridge? Send us the notice.
The deadline to appeal a householder refusal is twelve weeks from the date on the decision notice, and six months for most other applications, so you are not under pressure to decide this week. Getting the paperwork to us early simply means you find out sooner whether you have a case. Send us the decision notice and your plans, and we will tell you for free what we think; if it is worth appealing, the fee is £399.
