A refusal from Wiltshire is rarely the last word on your extension, because so many of the council’s refusals rest on nothing firmer than a case officer’s opinion, and an inspector, who does not work for the council, is free to take a different view and regularly does. Wiltshire turns down more applications than almost any council in England, so if yours has just been refused, you are a very long way from alone.
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 of whether it is worth appealing, free of charge. If it is, we will handle 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 work out, and it is what we will tell you before you commit to anything. Some refusals genuinely aren’t worth fighting, but most of the ones that reach us are, because a refusal notice written in the council’s own words and citing the council’s own policies reads very differently once an independent inspector has visited the site and measured it against national rules. Refusals that looked watertight on paper come apart under that kind of scrutiny all the time.
Nationally about a third of appeals succeed, and ours do better than that, at more than half, partly because we only take on the cases we believe in and partly because we know how to argue them.
Why Wiltshire refuses so much
Wiltshire is a big, largely rural county, and its planners work hard to protect its countryside and its many old and listed buildings. If you are near open country, in a conservation area or beside an older property, you can expect the character of the area and the setting of nearby heritage to be the reason the council gives for saying no. In the towns, such as Salisbury, Chippenham and Trowbridge, extensions and loft conversions are more often refused for being too large or for harming a neighbour’s light or outlook. Almost all of it is a matter of judgement, which is why so much of it does not survive an appeal.
A recent Wiltshire win
We recently won an appeal for a garage and home office at a listed coach house near Salisbury, which the council had refused on the grounds that it would harm the setting of the Grade II farmhouse next door and offered no benefits to weigh against that harm. The inspector disagreed on every point and granted permission, and you can read the full story here. That was a heritage case, but most of what we do is more ordinary than that: rear and side extensions, dormers and garden buildings, refused over their size or their effect on a neighbour and won back on appeal. If yours is one of those, it is exactly the sort of refusal that inspectors overturn most often.
What we actually do
Almost all householder and small-scheme appeals are decided on paper, so there is no hearing to attend and nothing for you to stand up and argue in person. You send us the refusal, we write the appeal statement that answers the council’s reasons one by one and puts the right policies and facts in front of the inspector, and the inspector then visits the site and decides. Writing that statement well is the whole job, and it is what your £399 pays for. If you would like to understand the process before you commit, our guide to how to win a planning appeal runs through it, and appeal or reapply is there if you are torn between the two.
Refused in Wiltshire? Send us the notice.
You have twelve weeks from the date on the decision notice to appeal a householder refusal, and six months for most other applications, so there is no need to decide today, though the sooner we see the paperwork the sooner you will know where you stand. Send us your decision notice and your plans, and we will give you an honest view at no charge; if it is worth appealing, our fixed fee is £399.
