Pre-Application Advisory London | Planning & Design

Pre-Application Advisory across London

Pre-application advisory helps you understand the planning and technical constraints affecting your site before you commit to a design or submit a planning application. We assess planning policy, conservation requirements, building regulations and technical feasibility to inform your project strategy.

Our pre-application service covers feasibility assessment, planning policy context, conservation area and listed building considerations, party wall implications, structural constraints and CDM requirements. We help clients make informed decisions about project viability before committing significant design fees. We provide technical building and feasibility input; planning strategy is led by a planning consultant and legal questions by your solicitor.

In London the gap between what an owner wants to do and what a site will actually allow is often wide, and the cheapest place to discover it is before design fees and a planning application are committed. Pre-application advice tests that gap: whether the extension, conversion or change of use is realistic against local planning policy and conservation controls, whether the structure can take it, and what party wall, basement or rights of light issues will need managing. We bring the technical and building-surveying view — feasibility, constraints and buildability — and are clear that planning strategy sits with a planning consultant and legal questions with a solicitor. The output is an honest read on viability and the risks worth resolving early, so clients commit to schemes that can actually be delivered rather than designs that unravel at application stage.

A planning application is decided against the development plan — the local plan and any neighbourhood plan — read alongside the National Planning Policy Framework, with the statutory presumption that decisions accord with the plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise. Engaging the local planning authority before submission tests a scheme against those policies while it can still change, which is where most of the value in pre-application advice sits.

A useful pre-app is more than a conversation: it identifies the policies that will govern the decision, the likely consultees (highways, conservation, trees, drainage), the validation requirements the authority will insist on, and the reports a valid submission must carry — a design and access statement, heritage or daylight assessments, and the rest. On heritage or larger schemes it flags early where an objection is likely, so the design responds before money is spent on a formal application.

Not every project needs a full application at all. Many domestic and commercial changes fall within permitted development under the General Permitted Development Order, sometimes subject to a prior-approval process, and confirming that route — or securing a lawful development certificate — can be faster and more certain than a householder application. We help establish which route a project belongs in, and what evidence each one demands, before you commit to a submission.