Advice to planning applicants (complaints about)
This fact sheet is aimed primarily at planning applicants who are unhappy with advice they have received from the council and may be considering making a complaint to the Ombudsman.
I asked the council for advice about the work I wanted to do. I followed the advice I was given and now discover it was wrong. Can the Ombudsman help me?
Only in limited circumstances. We are unlikely to investigate your complaint if your planning application was granted even if incorrect advice caused delay and extra cost, because you can appeal to the Planning Inspectorate if statutory timescales have not been met.
We are unlikely to investigate your complaint if you were advised that planning permission would be granted and it was refused because you can appeal to the Planning Inspectorate which has the power to grant you planning permission.
We can investigate your complaint if we think it is unreasonable to expect you to have appealed to the Planning Inspectorate, but we cannot usually do this until a decision has been made on the planning application. This is because until then, even if a council has done something wrong, we do not know how it will affect you.
How do I complain?
You should normally complain to the council first. Councils often have more than one stage in their complaints procedure and you will usually have to complete all stages before we will look at your complaint.
Then, if you are unhappy with the outcome, or the council is taking too long to look into the matter – we think 12 weeks is reasonable – you can complain to us.
Usually, you should complain to us within 12 months of when you first knew about the problem. If you leave it any later, we may not be able to help.
For more information on how to complain, please read our step by step process.
If you can consider my complaint what will the Ombudsman look for?
We look at the effect on you of following the advice and what would have been the outcome if you had been given the right information in the first place. Some of the things we can look into are whether the council:
- asked you for information which would have ensured you got a more accurate answer
- checked the records of what works had been done to your house before
- ensured that the staff answering your question knew about recent changes in the council’s policy
- wrongly interpreted the law in relation to the question you were asking
- did not have a system in place for ensuring that the advice it gave was properly recorded, or
- failed to make clear the status of the information being given, for example that other issues might arise once a formal planning application had been submitted.
What happens if the Ombudsman finds that the council was at fault?
Depending on what the complaint is about, we may ask the council to:
- ensure proper procedures are in place for providing advice to the public. For example, we might ask the council to introduce a checklist to ensure the right questions are asked at the outset
- ensure that there is an agreed interpretation of the law so that the same advice is provided whichever member of staff answers the question
- pay finncial remedy for costs incurred in having to suspend building work started on the understanding that planning permission was not needed, and/or
- pay financial remedy for avoidable time and trouble in making the complaint.
Examples of some complaints we have considered
Mrs X paid the council for pre-application advice about developing her land. In its response, the council said the land was within flood zone 3b and she would need to submit a flood risk assessment (FRA) with any planning application. Mrs X later submitted a FRA, which the council confirmed was ‘sufficient for a planning application’. The Environment Agency then objected to Mrs X’s application and said the FRA was inadequate. Mrs X asked another company to prepare a FRA, which company asked if she had passed the sequential test. (A FRA may need to apply the sequential test, which aims to ensure areas at little or no risk of flooding are developed in preference to areas at higher risk.) Mrs X asked the council about the sequential test. The council planning officer that had provided the pre application advice admitted they did not know about the sequential test. Mrs X complained that the council’s failure to tell her about the sequential test had cost her money and jeopardised her planning application. We found the council’s pre application advice was adequate in raising the need for a FRA. Any FRA would be carried out by a professional person or body, which should know when the sequential test applied. That Mrs X’s initial professional advisers were not aware of the sequential test, was not the council’s fault. But, when Mrs X submitted the FRA, the Council was at fault in not being aware it needed to apply the sequential test. We found the council had already acted to put matters right by offering to refund Mrs X’s pre-application and planning application fees and paying £400 for the distress she suffered.
Mr X paid for pre application advice about developing his land. The council said it was unlikely to grant planning permission for the proposed development. Mr X complained about how the council had communicated with him and saying its advice did not justify the fee he paid. The council accepted it should have returned Mr X’s telephone calls but said doing so would not have affected its advice. The council also replied to questions Mr X said were not addressed in its pre application advice.
We said the pre application service involved the council considering a proposal against local and national policy and guidance to provide informal advice on whether it is acceptable. It was not simply a cost for writing a letter as Mr X suggested. The council’s pre application advice was informal and not binding and Mr X could apply for planning permission if he disagreed with it. We did not investigate Mr X’s complaint as we found insufficient evidence of fault to warrant the council refunding Mr X’s pre application advice fee.
Other sources of information
- The Government’s gateway to planning information
- Planning portal
- The Planning Inspectorate telephone 0303 444 5000.
- Planning Aid's website
Your local council's website will contain information about some planning matters.
Our fact sheets give some general information about the most common type of complaints we receive but they cannot cover every situation. If you are not sure whether we can look into your complaint, please contact us.
August 2024