How to Read a Planning Application
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A bundle of planning drawings arrives, and unless you have a design background it can feel like a wall of technical jargon and scale bars. Tom Sykes is an architect, and he thinks that is precisely backwards: the drawings are not the fluff around a planning application, they are the application. Everything else describes what the drawings will actually build.
Tom was Head of Design for Transport for London and an Expert for the Design Council before founding Common Works, an architecture practice working with public sector clients and community groups. In this episode he takes councils through how to get inside a drawing, what quality looks like when you find it, and how to push back in language a planner has to take seriously.
What Tom covers:
- The three documents that matter. Out of the enormous pile on the portal, the design and access statement, the planning statement and the proposed site plan are where to spend your time. And watch for the word "weight" in the planning statement, because it usually marks something being quietly balanced away.
- Print it out and draw on it. Getting in there with a pen is the fastest way to understand a layout. Shade where the afternoon shadows fall. Count how many thresholds you cross between the street and your living room. Try taking the bins out. Try being a child coming out to play.
- What good looks like. A worked example in Swindon where a redesign added a third more homes while reducing road and parking, told through a land audit you can run on any scheme, and seven steps that turn a copy-paste layout into somewhere people can live.
- What bad looks like. A scheme where no home overlooks the play area, front doors are blocked from the street by parked cars, and the long view down the main street ends in a garage. Plus a completed high street with no tenant in any frontage, seven years on, because nobody drew a door.
- Writing a response that lands. Headline, back it up, ask for what you want. Two worked examples, and why short and precise beats long and cross.
- Design is a reason to refuse. Bad design is one of only eleven grounds in the new NPPF that can lead to refusal, which gives a well-argued design comment real teeth.
Tom's closing thought is worth the listen on its own: you do not have to like the look of any scheme he shows. Whether a place helps people form a community is a different question from whether you find it attractive, and that one is decided by the arrangement, not the styling.
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Questions answered in this episode
Drawn from our conversation with Tom Sykes, Architect, Client Advisor and Founder of Common Works, and from the questions raised during the live session. The answers below are editorial summaries, not verbatim transcripts.
Which documents in a planning application should a parish council look at first?
Three are worth the time. The design and access statement should tell the story of the project and ideally illustrate it, so it is where to look for hooks and for promises the drawings then fail to keep. The planning statement is written by planners for planners, but it reveals which issues the applicant thinks are problematic. The proposed site plan is the one that shows what will actually be built.
Can bad design on its own be a reason to refuse a planning application?
Yes. Under the revised NPPF there are only eleven policies stating that proposals should be refused, and design is one of them. That gives a design comment far more force than it used to have, provided it is tied back to the design and placemaking guidance rather than expressed as a matter of taste.
The drawings often have no scale bar or dimensions. Is that normal, and what can we do?
It is common and it is a legitimate complaint. Applications frequently arrive without a location plan, without dimensions, and with elevations that cannot be matched to the site plan. Asking for the missing information is reasonable and expected, and a validation team arguably ought to be rejecting packs that are incomplete in this way.
How do you actually read a site plan without a design background?
Print it as large as you can and draw over it. Put a red mark at every front door, shade in where the afternoon sun throws shadows, and walk yourself from the site entrance to the furthest door, counting the thresholds you cross. Most people are far better at reading plans than they think, because everyone spends time interpreting maps already.
What is a land audit and how would a council use one?
It measures what proportion of a site is given over to each use, so a scheme might be 20% built footprint, 40% highways and parking, and 27% private garden. Comparing those figures before and after a redesign turns a vague impression into an argument. One worked example added roughly a third more homes while reducing the share taken by roads and parking and gaining public realm.
What are the warning signs of a poorly designed housing scheme?
No key for the elevations, no joined-up elevations beyond a single street scene, no coordinated plan of house types, no eye-level perspectives, and no section through the site edges showing the relationship to neighbours. Floor-to-ceiling windows, windows crammed up against the eaves, circulation space with no natural light and fake chimneys all point the same way. It is also worth checking whether the drawings were produced by architects at all.
How should a planning response be worded so that it carries weight?
Three moves, kept short. Make a headline, such as the development not responding to the character of the settlement. Back it up with the specific evidence, such as house types that could exist anywhere. Then ask for what you want, such as a character study linked back to the drawings. Precision helps the reader focus, and each point should map to one segment of the design guidance.
Is orientation for sunlight and overheating actually considered in new housing?
It should be, and often it plainly has not been, with identical relationships repeated regardless of which way a home faces. Part O of the building regulations now requires new homes to be tested for overheating, which is starting to change what gets built. Recessing windows and having them open inwards so external shutters can be fitted is the right approach, and better developers are already doing it.
Can a council insist on heat pumps rather than gas boilers in new homes?
Realistically this is decided by legislation rather than by objection. London has already stopped gas boilers going into new-build homes and the rest of the country has not caught up. The greater share of the effort arguably needs to go into retrofitting existing homes rather than arguing scheme by scheme.
Where should parking go in a well-designed scheme?
In the better examples, parking sits in front of the home within a defined front yard rather than in a communal expanse of tarmac. That threshold does two jobs at once, giving the home a sense of privacy and keeping cars from dominating the shared space. Tricky corners of a site can then take allotments, kitchen gardens or out-of-the-way parking.
Applications now run to thousands of pages. How do you cope with the volume?
Download everything, then make a subfolder containing only the three documents that matter and work from that. The rest is context you can dip into rather than read. The volume is a genuine and widely shared frustration, and it is one reason a structured approach beats trying to read the pack cover to cover.