If you have received a planning enforcement notice from Barking and Dagenham, or a letter from a planning enforcement officer at Be First, you have a problem that needs handling properly and quickly. This is one of the most active enforcement authorities in London, with a planning team that has been deliberately rebuilt over recent years into one of the highest-performing in the country. The borough takes enforcement seriously, prosecutes non-compliance, and is prepared to take cases through to the Magistrates’ Court. None of that means a notice cannot be challenged — they very often can be, and we win appeals against the Council regularly — but it does mean the case has to be built carefully and on the right grounds.
How enforcement is run here
Barking and Dagenham is unusual in that its planning function is not run in-house. Since October 2017 it has been delivered by Be First (Regeneration) Ltd, a regeneration company wholly owned by the Council, headquartered on Linton Road in Barking. Notices are still issued in the Council’s name as local planning authority, but the officers, the enforcement register, and the planning portal all sit with Be First. If you are responding to anything in the borough, you are dealing with Be First’s planning team, not the Town Hall.
Be First is also responsible for the regeneration programme behind the borough’s huge growth ambitions — 50,000 new homes and 20,000 new jobs over twenty years, focused on eight designated Transformation Areas in the adopted 2037 Local Plan.
What the borough tends to enforce against
Three things keep the enforcement team busy. The first is unauthorised residential extensions — usually rear extensions that have gone up too deep, too tall, or too close to the neighbours, assessed against the Council’s Residential Extensions and Alterations SPD. The second is unauthorised changes of use, particularly conversions to flats and HMOs, often investigated in parallel with the borough’s licensing regime. The borough’s additional HMO licensing scheme covers every part of the borough and runs until 2030, which means enforcement officers and licensing officers regularly find themselves looking at the same property from different angles. The third is unauthorised commercial and industrial use of land — waste yards, scrap, vehicle repair, skip operations — which is a perennial issue in the industrial fringes and small commercial sites scattered around Dagenham and Chadwell Heath.
Beyond standard enforcement notices, the Council also makes use of section 215 notices for untidy land and buildings (especially on town centre frontages) and Planning Contravention Notices where ownership, occupation, or duration of use is unclear. When notices are ignored, the Council prosecutes — fines, costs, victim surcharges, and a criminal record are the realistic consequences of doing nothing, and the Council publicises its successful prosecutions.
How active is the borough nationally?
Very. In the year to 31 March 2025, the borough had 14 enforcement appeals decided by the Planning Inspectorate, placing it among the more active London authorities for enforcement work — well ahead of most outer London boroughs and at the upper end nationally. Volume of appeal activity is a reasonable proxy for volume of enforcement activity on the ground, and on this measure Barking and Dagenham is clearly not an authority that lets breaches slide.
The wider planning service has been deliberately rebuilt to a high standard. Be First publicly reports that it has been ranked first in the country for on-time planning decisions for three consecutive years, having been ranked 338 out of 341 authorities as recently as 2020. That turnaround tells you something useful about the current culture of the planning team: it is well-resourced, ambitious, and confident — and that confidence carries through into the enforcement function as well as into the application work.
Can enforcement notices be successfully appealed here?
Yes — and we are active in the borough.
We recently represented a client who had been served an enforcement notice alleging the conversion of a building into three self-contained flats without planning permission and requiring the property to be returned to a single flat within six months.
Compliance would have meant evicting the tenants and ripping out the conversion. We appealed on ground (d), arguing that by the time the notice was issued it was already too late for the Council to take enforcement action under the four-year rule that applied at the time. We provided a lot of evidence: statutory declarations, tenancy agreements, rent records, bank statements, conversion invoices, electrical installation certificates, gas safety certificates — all assembled to show on the balance of probabilities precisely what had happened and when. The inspector found the evidence “clear and unambiguous”, concluded that the change of use had occurred more than four years before the notice was issued, and quashed the notice. The flats stayed, the tenants stayed, and the client kept his investment.
Four things you must do
Act quickly. Enforcement notices have strict statutory deadlines. An appeal has to be lodged before the notice takes effect — usually 28 days from the date of issue — and once that period expires the right of appeal is gone permanently. Even at the earlier stages, when a Planning Contravention Notice has been served or a planning enforcement officer has been in touch informally, every day matters. The longer you leave it, the fewer options remain.
Never ignore an enforcement notice. It will not go away. Once the compliance period expires, failure to comply is a criminal offence under section 179 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The Council can prosecute, and it can also enter the land to carry out the works itself and recover the cost from you. Ignoring the notice is the worst thing you can do.
Take professional advice early. Enforcement is the most technical and unforgiving corner of the planning system. The procedural deadlines are tight, the legal tests for each ground of appeal are particular, and the strategic choices — whether to appeal at all, on which grounds, whether to submit a retrospective application instead, whether to try to negotiate compliance — have lasting consequences for the property. The Green Lane case was won because the right ground was identified at the outset and the right evidence was built around it. The same client, going it alone or on bad advice, would almost certainly have lost.
Treat it as a serious legal obligation. An enforcement notice is a binding legal instrument that runs with the land. It can affect your ability to sell or mortgage the property, it creates criminal liability for non-compliance, and it appears on the Council’s public enforcement register. Fines, costs, a victim surcharge and a criminal record are real outcomes, not theoretical ones.
How we can help
We act regularly in Barking and Dagenham — we know the borough, we know how the enforcement process is run and we know which arguments tend to work against the current policy framework. If you have received anything that looks like enforcement correspondence from the Council, get in touch early. The sooner we are involved, the more options remain on the table.
