The owner of a flat above a restaurant on Green Lanes, near Newington Green, came to us after Hackney Council ordered him to remove his entire roof extension.
He had planning permission for roof works — two separate approvals, in fact, granted in 2015 and 2016. But the side and rear dormers were built differently from the approved drawings, and the restaurant’s extract flue was extended upwards so that it would not discharge next to the new dormer windows.
The council served an enforcement notice requiring the removal of the dormers and the extract system, with all damage made good, within six months. For our client, that meant stripping the roof of his home back to what it had been.
The appeal
We appealed on grounds (a) and (f): that planning permission should be granted for what had been built, and that in any event the steps demanded went further than necessary.
The heart of the problem was that the dormers, as built, did not match any approved drawing. Arguing that they were close enough to the old permissions would only get us so far.
The fallback permission
So while the appeal was running, we did something else: a fresh planning application for the roof as it needed to be, which the council approved in February 2021 — a month before the inspector’s site visit.
That changed the question the inspector had to answer. Our client now held a live planning permission he could lawfully build. The issue was no longer whether the roof should exist, but whether what had actually been built was any more harmful than the scheme just approved.
What the inspector decided
The inspector found the differences between the dormers as built and the approved scheme to be “minimal”. The side dormer matched the approvals in design, size and scale; the rear dormer was slightly larger but sat within the hip roof, below the ridge, and both were finished in slate to match the building. He also noted that the surrounding roofscape was full of dormers and mansards, so the works sat comfortably in the area.
The appeal was allowed for the dormers: the notice was quashed as it related to them, and planning permission was granted for them.
The extract flue went the other way. The inspector found it prominent and obtrusive, and no noise or odour evidence had been provided to show it caused neighbours no harm. That part of the notice was upheld.
A split decision — and a win where it counted
On paper this was a split decision. In practice, our client kept the whole roof extension — the expensive, structural, lived-in part of the works — and had only the flue to resolve. Six months of demolition became a much smaller job.
An enforcement appeal can be engineered as well as argued: the fallback permission obtained mid-appeal is what reframed the dormers from unauthorised works into a minor variation of an approved scheme. And where a notice attacks several things at once, they can be fought separately — the inspector accepted that the dormers and the flue were severable, and decided each on its own merits.
Facing enforcement action in Hackney?
Hackney serves more enforcement notices than most London councils, and its notices have a poor record at appeal — our guide to planning enforcement in Hackney explains how the council operates and what to do within the 28-day appeal window.
If you have received an enforcement notice, send it to us with whatever planning history you have. We will review it for free, tell you which parts of it can be fought and how, and quote a fixed fee for the work. If you are facing enforcement action in Hackney or anywhere else in England, please contact us for advice.
