Most planning appeals in England are now decided without an appeal statement. The Planning Inspectorate calls the new system the Part One written representations procedure, and it applies to most planning applications submitted on or after 1 April 2026. If your refusal falls within it, your appeal will be decided almost entirely on the papers the council saw when it made its decision. Understanding that single fact will do more for your chances than anything else in this article.
Does the new procedure apply to your case?
It applies to most appeals against a refusal of planning permission, including householder extensions, prior approval cases, reserved matters and applications to vary or remove conditions, where the application was submitted on or after 1 April 2026.
It does not apply to appeals against enforcement notices, which continue under their own regime with full grounds of appeal and written statements. It also does not apply to lawful development certificate appeals, listed building consent appeals, appeals where the council failed to make a decision in time, or the small number of cases that go to a hearing or public inquiry. And if your application was submitted before 1 April 2026, the old procedure still applies to your appeal, complete with a full appeal statement. Because non-householder refusals carry a six-month appeal deadline, appeals under the old rules will keep being submitted well into 2027.
What you actually submit
Under the old system, the heart of an appeal was the appeal statement: a document of several pages, prepared after the refusal, arguing the case in full. That document has gone. You now submit the appeal form itself, with a short set of grounds of appeal, around 250 words, explaining why the council’s decision is wrong.
You cannot submit anything else. No new daylight report, no comparable permissions the council never saw, no revised drawings, no additional letter from your architect. The inspector will not research the planning history of your site or go looking for similar schemes nearby. If a document was not before the council when it refused your application, it will not be before the inspector either.
The timetable
The deadlines for appealing are unchanged: 12 weeks from the decision notice for householder applications, six months for most others. Once the appeal is submitted, the council has five working days to return its questionnaire and the application documents. The inspector then usually carries out a brief site visit, normally unaccompanied, and issues a decision within a few months. You will not attend a hearing and there is nothing for you to present on the day. The site visit is for the inspector to see the site, and is not an opportunity for anyone to argue their case.
What this means in practice
The appeal now rests on the strength of your application file. When we review a refusal, the first thing we look at is whether the case for permission is already sitting in that file: the drawings, the planning statement, any supporting reports, and the way objections were dealt with while the application was live. If it is, an appeal with well-aimed grounds stands a very good chance, because around 40% of appeals succeed nationally and refusals of sensible proposals are still being made every week. If it is not, the honest advice is usually a fresh application rather than an appeal, because a weak file cannot be rescued at the appeal stage.
There is a silver lining. Because the procedure involves much less written work than the old one, professional fees for these appeals are considerably lower than they used to be. Submitting the appeal itself remains free.
If you are still at the application stage, read our guide to making your application appeal-ready from day one.
If you have received a refusal, send us the decision notice. We will review it for free, tell you honestly whether an appeal or a fresh application is the better route, and quote a fixed fee before any work starts.
