Planning and Listed Building Consent

A house here is rarely governed by one consent regime. It is governed by several at once, and a scheme that satisfies four of them and overlooks the fifth does not proceed.

The borough has thirty-eight conservation areas covering around seventy-three per cent of its land. Holland Park is area five, designated in 1981 when two smaller conservation areas were amalgamated, with its appraisal adopted in 2017. It centres on Holland House, listed Grade I, and its parkland, which is registered Grade II. Neighbouring stock falls under Norland, Ladbroke, Pembridge, Colville and Kensington.

Two points of terminology are worth getting right, because they signal whether an adviser is current. There is no Notting Hill Conservation Area; that area is covered by Ladbroke, Pembridge, Colville and Norland. And Royal Crescent, which owners frequently assume has its own designation, sits inside the Norland Conservation Area.

Planning Permission

For external alteration, extension and any change to the envelope. In a conservation area RBKC requires full applications, so outline applications are not accepted.

Listed Building Consent

For any work affecting the special interest of a listed building, inside as well as out. Separate from planning permission, and frequently both are needed.

Relevant Demolition

What replaced Conservation Area Consent when that was abolished in October 2013. Demolition in a conservation area now needs planning permission, and carrying it out without permission remains a criminal offence.

Estate Consent

A private layer on top of the statutory one. On the Ilchester Estate, written consent is required for any external alteration, in addition to anything the Council grants.

Permitted development rights are the reason an owner elsewhere in London can replace their windows or extend at the rear without applying for anything. In Kensington and Chelsea, those rights have been progressively withdrawn, and every part of the borough falls within at least one Article 4 direction. There are more than eighty of them, made between the 1970s and 2014.

Taking Norland as the worked example, the directions there remove the right to enlarge, improve or alter a dwellinghouse, which brings cornices, windows, doors, railings and balconies into control. They remove the right to build outbuildings in gardens, to lay hardstanding or a driveway in a front garden, to remove or alter gates, fences and walls, and to paint the exterior.

Basements are covered borough-wide. Article 100, made in April 2015 and confirmed in April 2016, removes permitted development rights for basement extensions to single dwellinghouses across the whole of RBKC, so every basement here needs planning permission without exception.

One further point catches owners of flats and mansion blocks, which are a large share of the stock in W8 and W14. Permitted development rights only ever applied to dwellinghouses. A flat has none to withdraw, so alterations that a neighbour in a house might once have made freely have always required an application.

The classic prime central London project is to take a house that was carved into four flats in the 1960s and return it to a single family dwelling. Owners tend to assume the Council will welcome it as a restoration of the building's original form. RBKC's position is close to the opposite.

Policy HO1(B) protects existing market residential homes, including by not allowing the amalgamation of self-contained homes. The borough failed the Government's Housing Delivery Test at forty-three per cent of its target and cites a sustained loss of homes to amalgamation as part of the reason. Every flat removed is a home lost from its supply.

The exception is narrow. It may still be possible to amalgamate a maximum of two homes into one, and only where the existing homes are substandard, meaning significantly below the minimum size standards for even a studio and lacking adequate natural daylight and ventilation. A scheme that assumes de-conversion will be granted as a matter of course needs rethinking before any money is spent on drawings.

The Party Wall etc. Act 1996 sits alongside the planning system rather than inside it, and it runs on its own timetable. On a terraced house in W11 the notices frequently go to both flanks and to the rear.

Silence is not agreement. If an adjoining owner does not respond within fourteen days of service, a dispute is deemed to have arisen and surveyors must be appointed. Where the works are solely for the building owner's benefit, the building owner ordinarily pays the cost of drawing up the award, including the adjoining owner's surveyor's fees.

The award records what will be carried out, when and how, and usually incorporates a schedule of condition photographing the neighbouring property before anything starts. That schedule settles most subsequent damage claims on its own. RBKC's own Local Plan advises applicants to begin party wall negotiations before the planning application is submitted, which is sound advice and rarely followed.

Line of Junction, Section 1

One month's notice. A new wall built on the boundary line.

Party Structure, Section 2

Two months' notice. Cutting into, raising, underpinning or removing part of a shared wall.

Adjacent Excavation, Section 6

One month's notice. Required within three metres of a neighbour's structure and deeper than their foundations, or within six metres where the dig meets a line drawn down at forty-five degrees from the base of their foundations.

The statutory determination periods are eight weeks for householder and minor applications, eight weeks for listed building consent, and thirteen weeks for major schemes. Those are the targets rather than a guarantee, and extensions of time by agreement with the borough are common on anything contentious.

The current position needs stating honestly, because it affects every programme being drawn up this year. RBKC's planning systems were taken offline by a cyber attack in late November 2025 and did not return until March 2026, leaving a backlog of roughly seventeen hundred planning applications. The Council has reduced some consultation periods to the statutory minimum of twenty-one days, extended committee sessions and taken on additional staff to work through it, and has said it cannot give individual timescales.

The practical consequence is that a programme built on an eight-week determination is a programme that will slip. Any firm worth appointing will plan on the consent period running longer than the statutory target, and will start the party wall process and the pre-application discussions in parallel rather than in sequence, which is the only part of the timetable still within anyone's control.