Does This Appeal to You? Now Try Explaining It in 250 Words

I've seen many reforms to the planning system over the years. Most tinker at the edges. A few actually change how the profession behaves. The new approach to planning appeals is among the latter - and I don't think it's working, at least not in the cases that matter most.

The pitch behind it is simple enough: get it right first time.

Fair enough. No planning consultant worth their fee has ever aimed for anything less. The best result for a client has never been “win on appeal” - it has been permission the first time round, with no appeal required. That much hasn't changed and never needed to.

But “get it right first time” is doing far more work than it used to, and the application now places even greater emphasis on it.

Strip away the process detail, and it comes down to this: for the majority of appeals now reaching the Planning Inspectorate, the case for why the council got it wrong - not the evidence behind it, but the argument itself - has to be made in 250 words on the appeal form.

The appeal starts with the application

The practical effect of the reforms is that your appeal case must exist before you've been refused. There's much less room to introduce new evidence, arguments or explanations once the decision's gone against you. So the quality of what you submit at the application stage now matters more than ever.

Experienced practitioners have always tried to anticipate sticking points and address them up front. But that was never a guarantee of agreement, and it isn't meant to be - this isn't about applications being wrong. It's about a difference in interpretation, or a consultee response nobody could reasonably have foreseen at the outset. What's changed is how much scope there is to deal with that once it surfaces after submission, rather than before. Often, this comes down to the planning officer's willingness to negotiate or agree an extension of time for the application.

That's a problem because planning isn't an exact science. It's the art of the science - evidence, policy and judgement, mixed together and debated. A consultee raises an issue you didn't anticipate. An officer reads the same policy differently from you. Reasonable people, looking at the same facts, reach different conclusions. That's not the system failing. That's the system doing what it's meant to do.

A system running on empty

Here's the tension that is brought to bear on the process: you can't ask applicants to front-load everything into pre-application discussions when the local planning authorities don't have the staff to handle them properly.

This isn't a swipe at planning officers. The ones I deal with, by and large, have far too much on their plate. Recruitment and retention across the sector are genuinely strained, and that's not news to anyone reading this. The issue isn't competence. It's capacity.

Pre-app is usually a fee-paid service - the applicant pays for the officer's time, just as they would for a live application. What it doesn't include is a statutory deadline. So when a determination clock is ticking on one file, you know which files are pushed back.

Because there's no statutory framework, what you actually get back varies enormously from one authority to the next. Ask five LPAs for pre-app advice on a comparable scheme, and you'll get five different standards of rigour, turnaround and usefulness. Half joking: perhaps what this system actually needs is a National Scheme of Pre-Application Advice - a statutory minimum for content and turnaround, the same everywhere.

So you end up with a system that says, “resolve everything early”, resting on a process that structurally can't guarantee the early engagement it depends on. That's not a minor design flaw. That's the whole model working against itself.

The checks and balances are thinning out

Then there's what's happening at the other end.

For those of a certain age, “the Perry Mason moment” needs no explanation - the courtroom drama in which the decisive piece of evidence lands, the witness is tested, and the whole case turns on it. For everyone else, Google it (other search engines are available).

Planning appeals were never quite that theatrical, but there used to be a version of it. When I started, written representations already accounted for the bulk of appeals by volume - that's not new, and it was never the wrong tool for a householder extension or a modest scheme with one issue to settle. What's changed is what else is drawn into the same procedure. Anything with real substance - competing evidence, a genuine dispute over interpretation - used to go to a hearing or inquiry, where you could test the other side's case and respond to a point as it was made, in real time, in front of someone.

To be fair, this option is available, but at the discretion of the Inspectorate; over the years, the Inspectorate steadily narrowed what qualified for that treatment, nudging more of the harder territory into written representations instead. The 2026 reforms finish the job. For applications submitted on or after 1 April 2026, most section 78 appeals - refusals of permission, conditions, prior approval, reserved matters and the rest - now default to the expedited written procedure, and it's the Inspectorate that decides whether yours is one of the few that escapes it. The pyramid was always wide at the base. The Inspectorate has been trying to flatten the pyramid over the years; it's now being flattened further.

And here's the part that matters. Under that expedited route, there is no statement of case. It's gone. The full written argument that used to sit alongside the appeal - the place where you set out, at proper length, exactly where the council went wrong - is no longer part of the process. What replaces it is a box on the appeal form with a 250-word limit.

That's understandable in isolation - the expedited procedure is quicker and proportionate for many appeals, and I won't pretend otherwise. But it also means the safety valve that used to exist for even more complex or contested cases via the written representations method has narrowed considerably, just when those cases need it most.

For most appellants now, the opening argument - the part that has to explain why the council got it wrong, whether that's a misreading of the facts, a different view on policy, or the wrong weight given to a material consideration - comes down to that box. 250 words.

To be fair to the process, that's not supposed to carry the whole case. If the application was properly prepared, the bulk of the evidence is already in the file for the Inspector to find - the technical reports, the planning statement, and the consultation responses. Nobody is asking anyone to reconstruct all of that in a paragraph.

What has to fit into 250 words is the disagreement itself. Why the council's interpretation was wrong, why a different weighting should have applied in the planning balance, and why a consultee's rigid reading of its own guidance shouldn't have been treated as gospel rather than advice. Argue one of those properly, and 250 words are already tight. Planning decisions are rarely about just one issue, though. Try doing justice to two or three in the same 250 words, and succinctness tips into the ridiculous. You stop making the argument and start deciding what to leave out.

That's what I mean by checks and balances eroding. The appeal used to be the forum where a poor decision, or a defensible difference of professional opinion, could be properly expressed.

Where that leaves us

None of this is an argument against front-loading in principle, and it's certainly not an argument that every refusal deserves a full inquiry. A lot of appeals are genuinely straightforward and don't need one.

But stack the three pressures together - a system that punishes late-emerging arguments more harshly than before, LPAs too stretched to deliver the early engagement the model depends on, and an appeal pyramid flattened until written representations cover an increasing number of cases where several issues combine, which would have been argued in a statement of case - and they all funnel into the same bottleneck: an argument that has to be made in 250 words, on a refusal that's rarely about one thing.

Planning will always involve judgement, and reasonable people will keep disagreeing about it. That's not a defect to be engineered out. It's the job. But a system that spends this long front-loading the process, and hands back this little room to argue the disagreement when it goes wrong, has got its priorities the wrong way round.

Get it right first time is a fine aspiration. Nobody in this profession would argue otherwise. But next time someone tells you the new appeal procedure is working as intended, ask them the only question that matters: do you expect to fit your case into 250 words?