In short
From 31 October 2026, a council planning officer will decide every householder planning application in England. That covers extensions, loft conversions, garage conversions and outbuildings. They can’t go to a planning committee any more. It’s called the national scheme of delegation, and it changes who makes the decision, not the rules your plans are judged against.
So it won’t make your extension automatic, and building regs don’t change at all. What it does remove is the chance of your application getting stuck in a committee queue, which in our experience can add months to a decision. If your application’s already in, you don’t need to do anything.
What is the national scheme of delegation?
Every council has a rulebook that says which planning decisions its officers can make on their own, and which have to go in front of a committee of local councillors. That rulebook is called a scheme of delegation.
Until now, each council wrote its own. That's why two near-identical extensions in neighbouring boroughs could have completely different journeys. One gets signed off by an officer in eight weeks. The other gets called in by a ward councillor, or pulled into committee because enough neighbours objected, then waits months for a slot on the agenda.
From 31 October, there's one rulebook for the whole of England, set out in the Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026. For homeowners, the important bit is short: householder applications have to be decided by an officer. No committee, and no call-in.
Where this comes from: the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025
The national scheme is one part of the government's wider planning reforms. Section 54 of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 inserted sections 319ZZC to 319ZZF into the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Those sections give ministers the power to set a single national scheme of delegation and to cap the size of planning committees. The regulations that bring the scheme into force were made in July 2026.
The government's stated aim is to free councillors up to focus on bigger, more contentious schemes, rather than individual extensions.
What changes on 31 October 2026 for planning committees
Here is what is different for a householder application before and after the date.
| Your extension |
Before 31 October |
From 31 October |
| Who decides it |
Usually an officer, but every council set its own rules and committee was always possible |
A council planning officer, every time |
| Can a councillor call it in to committee? |
Yes, in most councils |
No. Councils have to remove call-in from their rules |
| Do lots of neighbour objections send it to committee? |
In many councils, yes, once objections hit a set number |
No. The number of objections doesn't change who decides |
The same goes for a few other things homeowners deal with regularly. An officer now has to decide:
- prior approval applications, the quick check some larger permitted development extensions need
- lawful development certificates, the certificate that proves your project doesn't need planning permission
- approving the conditions attached to a permission you already have
- small changes to an approved plan, known as non-material amendments
- minor residential development, meaning schemes of up to nine new dwellings, and minor commercial development
Are planning rules being relaxed? What isn't changing
Short answer: no. A lot of the coverage has made it sound like planning just got easier, so it's worth being clear about what stays exactly as it was.
The rules are the same. Your planning officer works from the same national planning policy and the same local plan a committee would have used. You'll still be assessed on overlooking, overshadowing, whether it's too big for the plot, and whether the design suits your house and street.
Permission isn't automatic. This changes who decides, not what they decide. Applications that would have been refused before will likely still be refused, for the same reasons.
Building regs haven't moved. Planning and building regulations are two separate things. Planning is about whether you can build it. Building regs are about whether it's built safely: structure, insulation, fire escape, drainage and ventilation. Your builder still needs building control sign-off on exactly the same terms as before.
If there's one thing to take away, it's that the standard your extension has to meet, and the standard your builder has to work to, are both exactly where they were.
"The question I keep getting is whether this makes permission easier. It doesn't. The route's changed, not the test. If an extension would've been refused for overlooking last month, it'll be refused for overlooking next month. You'll just hear from the officer who assessed it, rather than months later after a committee meeting."
— Danielle Price, Senior Planning Consultant, Resi
Will householder planning applications be quicker?
For most people, probably not by much. Officers were already deciding the vast majority of householder planning applications, and the statutory target is still eight weeks from validation. That's the point your council confirms your application is complete and starts the clock.
Where it really helps is the smaller group whose applications would have ended up at committee. In our experience, applications that went to committee took months longer than the eight-week target, for the same extension, judged against the same policy.
That wait has real costs, even if none of them show up on a planning invoice:
- paying rent and a mortgage at the same time while you can't start
- losing your builder's start date and going to the back of their queue
- quotes running out and coming back higher
- building through the winter instead of the summer
Zooming out, English councils decided 145,600 householder applications in the year to June 2026, and around one in ten took longer than two months.
The official headline looks better: 93% decided "within eight weeks or an agreed extended time". That last part is doing a lot of work. When a council knows it's going to miss eight weeks, it'll often ask you to sign an extension of time agreement. So a decision can count as "on time" and still land months after you applied.
Committee was never the only thing slowing applications down, but for the people it affected, it was often the biggest. From 31 October, that route's closed for extensions. If you want to know what a typical timeline looks like, we've broken it down in how long does planning permission take.
Does this mean more cowboy builders?
You might have seen headlines linking the new planning rules to a rise in cowboy builders and rogue traders. It's a fair thing to worry about, because cowboy builders are a real problem. Government figures show more than one in four UK adults who had home improvement work done in the last 18 months ran into problems, and that people lost over £10.3 billion on home and garden maintenance in 2024 through poor work, inflated pricing and unfair practices.
But we don't think the new planning rules change much here, and here's why.
The argument goes like this: easier planning means more extensions, and more extensions means more work for dodgy builders. Both halves are shakier than they look.
Start with the first. This change only affects applications that would have gone to a planning committee, and for householder work that was always a small minority. Almost every extension, loft and garage conversion was already being decided by an officer. So the number of home projects going ahead is unlikely to move much.
The second half doesn't follow either, because planning permission has never been a check on your builder.
Think about what a planning officer actually looks at. Is the extension a sensible size? Does it take away a neighbour's light or privacy? Does it suit the house and the street? Nobody at the council asks who's building it, whether they're qualified, or whether they've left a trail of half-finished jobs. That was true before 31 October, and it's still true after.
The numbers behind the headlines come from one vetting platform. It blocked 1,223 tradespeople in the first eight months of 2026, and its rejections went from an average of 89 a month last year to 152 a month this year. Those are big numbers, and the platform's view is that bad operators are getting into position ahead of the change. Maybe. But a platform turning more people away tells you about who's applying to it and how tough its checks are. It can't tell you much about planning, which has never looked at who does the building.
What actually protects you
None of the real protections sit in the planning system, and none of them have changed:
- Building control sign-off. An independent inspector checks the work against building regs at stages through the build and at the end. The completion certificate is the bit you'll need when you come to sell.
- A written contract. Scope, price, payment stages, and what happens if the work is late or wrong.
- Staged payments. Don't pay everything upfront, and hold back a retention until the snagging list is done.
- Checking them yourself. Visit a couple of their recent jobs, talk to those homeowners, and confirm their insurance.
If you'd rather not do all of that on your own, that's what Resi Build Ready is for. We'll introduce you to builders we know and trust, and help you assess them and their quotes, so you can choose with a bit more confidence.
These are the right checks today, and they’ll still be the right checks on 1 November.
Already submitted your application?
You don't need to do anything, and you don't need to resubmit.
The new rules apply to decisions made from 31 October, not to applications submitted from that date. So if yours is still waiting for a decision on the 31st, an officer decides it. That holds even if your council had already set a committee date for it.
Two things worth doing, though:
- Check where it's at. Look it up on your council's planning portal. If a committee date had been mentioned, drop your case officer a line so you know who is deciding it and when.
- Don't let it drift. If you're past eight weeks from validation and haven't agreed an extension of time, you're within your rights to chase. In some cases you can appeal for non-determination, which is when the council hasn't made a decision in time.
