The appeal form gives you a box of around 250 words to explain why the council got it wrong. For most appeals against a refusal of planning permission, that box is now the whole argument under the new appeal rules. No statement follows it, and the inspector decides the case on your grounds and the application file the council already has. Writing those few words well is a discipline, and most appellants get it badly wrong.
What the grounds are actually for
The grounds cannot introduce anything new. The inspector will only consider material that was before the council, so the job of the grounds is to direct the inspector to the strongest points already in your file and to explain, briefly, why the council’s reasoning does not stand up. When I worked as a council planner I read plenty of appeal submissions that tried to relitigate the whole application in miniature. The ones that worried us named the weakest link in our refusal and went straight at it.
Choose the decisive issue
Most refusals stand or fall on one or two points. A refusal notice may list three reasons, and the officer’s report may raise half a dozen concerns, but there is usually a single judgement at the heart of it: the extension is said to be overbearing, or out of character, or harmful to a neighbour’s light. Work out what that judgement is and spend your words on it. A ground that deals convincingly with the decisive issue beats five grounds that skim everything.
What to leave out
Leave out the story of how long the application took and how frustrating the process has been. Inspectors are unmoved by indignation. Leave out attacks on the case officer, which achieve nothing and read poorly. Leave out anything the council never saw, because the inspector cannot consider it. And resist the urge to repeat the whole planning statement: the inspector has it and will read it. Your grounds should point at it, with references, rather than reproduce it.
A structure that works
One sentence on what was refused and why. Then the main ground: why the council’s key judgement is wrong, anchored to specific material in the file (“the daylight assessment at Appendix 2 shows…”). Then policy: the one or two policies the proposal complies with, and why the officer’s reading of them is mistaken. Finish with anything material the officer overlooked, if the file supports it. If that comes to fewer than 250 words, good. Padding weakens it.
Do you need help with this?
You can write your own grounds, and some people do it well. But compressing a planning argument into a few hundred words that will move a professional inspector is exactly the kind of work where experience tells. All of our consultants are chartered town planners who have sat on the other side of the process, and because the new procedure involves far less written work than the old appeal statements, our fees for these appeals are much lower than they used to be. Send us your refusal notice and we will review it for free, tell you whether an appeal is worth making, and quote a fixed fee for preparing and managing it.
