Building regulations vs planning permission: the difference explained
Spring & Co, Stockport. Construction & property consultants since 1992
Planning permission decides whether you are allowed to build something. Building regulations decide whether the thing you build is safe and legal to use. They are two separate consents, from two separate bodies, on two separate applications, and on most jobs you need both. Holding one has never once meant you hold the other.
We get asked to untangle this most weeks, usually by someone who has just been told their project needs an approval they were sure they already had. The confusion is fair. Both come from the council, both involve drawings, both cost money and time. But they answer completely different questions, and a scheme can sail through one while failing the other.
So what is the actual difference?
Planning permission is about the outside world. It asks whether a building should exist in that place, in that form, doing that job: how it looks, how it is used, what it does to neighbours, parking, light, and the character of the street. In Stockport that decision sits with Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council as the local planning authority, working to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and the council's own local plan policies.
Building regulations are about the fabric. They ask whether the thing is built properly: the structure, fire safety, insulation, ventilation, drainage, accessibility, and energy performance. That is judged by a building control body against the Building Regulations 2010 and the Approved Documents beneath them, from Approved Document A for structure to Part L for energy and Part B for fire.
One looks outward. The other looks at the wall.
Do I actually need both, or just one?
Most substantial work needs both, and the pattern is worth knowing before you budget. A lot of building work is allowed without a planning application under permitted development rights, set out in the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 2015. Almost nothing is exempt from building regulations. So the common trap is assuming that because you do not need planning, you do not need any approval at all.
| The work | Planning permission | Building regulations |
|---|---|---|
| Internal fit out, no change of use | Usually not needed | Needed |
| Extension within permitted development | Often not needed | Needed |
| Change of use (for example a unit to a takeaway, offices to homes) | Usually needed | Needed |
| A new commercial building | Needed | Needed |
| Like for like repair or maintenance | Not needed | Usually not needed |
Change of use is where people are caught most often. Turning a unit into a hot food takeaway, or offices into homes, is a change of use in planning terms even when you touch very little of the actual building, and it always triggers building regulations for fire and means of escape. If you want the detail on the planning side of a commercial scheme, we wrote a separate piece on commercial planning permission in the North West.
If you are weighing up a purchase or a conversion and are not sure which consents bite, that is exactly the review our property consultancy team runs before you commit. It is far cheaper to know now than to find out at completion.
What does building control actually check?
Building control checks the parts of a building you stop seeing once it is finished. Approved Document A covers structure, so foundations, beams and load paths. Part B covers fire: escape routes, compartmentation, and how the materials behave. Part L covers energy and insulation. Part M covers access. Part P covers electrical safety in homes. Drainage, ventilation and sound each carry their own part as well.
It is not a single sign off at the end. A building control surveyor inspects at set stages as the work goes up: excavation and foundations, damp proofing, drainage before it is covered, the structural frame, and a final completion inspection. Miss a stage and they can ask for work to be opened back up, which on a live site is the most expensive four words in the trade.
The document that proves all of this happened is the completion certificate. Keep coming back to that phrase. It matters more than most people realise, for reasons we will get to.
Who decides, how long, and what does it cost?
On the planning side the council determines the application. The statutory targets are 8 weeks for a minor or householder application and 13 weeks for a major one, though a complicated scheme is often managed through an extension of time agreement rather than a straight refusal. Fees are set nationally and rose in December 2023: a householder application in England is £258, and a full application for a new dwelling is £578 per home.
Here is the part nobody tells you. The 8 week clock does not start when you press submit. It starts when the council validates the application, and a missing ownership certificate or an under scaled drawing can lose you a fortnight before the clock even begins.
Building regulations work differently. There is no single national fee. Each building control body sets its own charges against a published scale, and you get two choices: the route and the body. The route is a full plans application, where your drawings are checked and approved before you start, or a building notice, where you simply notify and get inspected as you go. The body is either the council's own building control or a private Registered Building Control Approver.
My view, and some in the trade will disagree, is that for anything commercial you use full plans every time. A building notice is quicker to start and fine for a domestic job a good builder has done a hundred times over. On a commercial project it leaves you with no approved set of drawings to hold a contractor to, and that ambiguity costs more than the fortnight it saved. The coordination of all this, from the applications through to discharging conditions and passing inspections, is the day job of a construction project manager, and it is rarely as tidy as a linear checklist.
What changed after Grenfell and the Building Safety Act?
Quite a lot, and it is still bedding in. From 1 October 2023 the old approved inspectors were renamed Registered Building Control Approvers, and every building control professional now has to register with the Building Safety Regulator. For higher risk buildings, meaning those at least 18 metres tall or 7 storeys with two or more residential units, the Building Safety Regulator is itself the building control body, through a three gateway regime you cannot pass without demonstrating the safety case. Start or occupy without clearing the gate and you are breaking the law.
Most of our clients are not putting up towers. But the direction of travel reaches everyone: more scrutiny, tighter record keeping, and far less patience for sorting the fire strategy out on site after the fact. If your scheme has any real complexity to its fire or structural design, that thinking now belongs at the drawing board, which is where our CDM and health and safety advice starts.
What does this look like in Stockport specifically?
The older core of Stockport is stone and red brick, largely Victorian and Edwardian, and a good deal of it sits inside conservation areas: the Market Place and the Underbanks, and residential pockets across the Heatons. Inside a conservation area, permitted development rights are trimmed by Article 4 directions, so a change that would be permitted without an application on a 1970s estate in Bramhall needs a full planning application in Heaton Moor. Same works, different consent, purely because of where the wall stands.
There is a second Stockport factor. A lot of live work here is conversion and change of use, pushed along by the town centre regeneration around Town Centre West under the Stockport Mayoral Development Corporation, set up in 2019. Turning a former mill or a tired retail block into flats or workspace is exactly where the two regimes pull in opposite directions. Planning often welcomes the reuse of a heritage building. Building control then asks you to bring a structure well over a century old up to modern fire, access, energy and acoustic standards.
That gap is where budgets die.
And if the building is listed rather than simply sitting in a conservation area, you add a third consent, listed building consent, on top of the other two. The older and more characterful the stock, the more moving parts you are holding at once.
The mistake that costs the most
The single most expensive thing we see is a missing building regulations completion certificate. Planning approval proves the council agreed to the scheme. It says nothing about whether the building was ever signed off as safely built. Those are different documents from different bodies, and a buyer's solicitor knows it.
When you come to sell or refinance, the purchaser's conveyancer and the lender's monitoring surveyor ask for the completion certificate for any material work. If it is not there, the deal stalls while you chase a regularisation certificate or take out an indemnity policy, and a stalled deal at that stage is worth far more than the certificate ever cost. We see it most on units where a previous occupier added a mezzanine or knocked two shops together and never closed out building control. Catching that early is a core part of due diligence and fund monitoring work.
The honest downside of how we work: we make clients pay for a consents and completion check before they exchange, and now and then it comes back completely clean and the fee feels wasted. It never is. A clean answer is precisely the thing you were paying for.
Common questions
Can building regulations approval be refused after I already have planning permission?
Yes. The two are independent. A scheme can hold full planning permission and still fail building control if the design does not meet the technical standards, most often on fire escape, structural loading or insulation. Resolve both in parallel at design stage rather than assuming one clears the other.
How long does planning permission last before it expires?
A full planning permission in England normally lasts three years from the date of the decision. You have to make a material start on site within that window or the consent lapses and you apply again. A full plans building regulations approval carries its own separate time limits, so do not treat the two as one clock.
Do I need planning permission for a change of use in a conservation area?
Often yes. Conservation area status and Article 4 directions strip out many of the permitted development rights you would rely on elsewhere, so changes that need no application in an ordinary location can need full planning permission here. Check the specific designation on the land before you assume anything.
If you have a project in Stockport or across the North West and you are not certain which consents apply, or you want the whole approvals path mapped before you spend, talk to our team. We would rather answer the question now than untangle it at completion.