Commercial planning permission in the North West

Yes, most commercial development in the North West needs planning permission, and for a major scheme, roughly 1,000 sq m of floorspace or a site of 1 hectare or more, the council has 13 weeks to decide. The application fee starts at £610 for every 0.1 hectare of the site. Here is how it actually runs, and where the timetable slips.

We have taken schemes through most of the Greater Manchester authorities since 1992. The rules are national. The way a local authority applies them is not.

Do I even need planning permission?

Not always, and that is the first thing worth checking before you spend a penny. Since the Use Classes Order was reformed in September 2020, most commercial premises sit in Class E, the commercial, business and service class. It covers shops, offices, restaurants, gyms, clinics and light industrial space. Moving between those uses inside the same building, a shop becoming an office, an office becoming a physiotherapy clinic, is no longer development at all. No application, no fee.

You cross back into needing permission when you build something new, extend, change the use to something outside Class E such as a pub, a takeaway or housing, or touch a listed building or a conservation area. Some of those out-of-class changes are covered by permitted development under the General Permitted Development Order, but permitted does not mean automatic. A change from Class E to residential under Class MA, for example, still needs a prior approval application, currently £260 for each home created, and the council can refuse it on flooding, noise, contamination and a handful of other grounds.

Here is the opinion that saves people money. If your scheme stays inside Class E, do not lodge a planning application at all. Close to a third of the enquiries that reach us are for permission the applicant never needed, and a withdrawn application still costs you weeks off the programme and a validation fee you do not get back. Check the use class first. Apply second.

How long does a decision really take?

The statutory clocks come from the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) Order 2015: eight weeks for a minor application, 13 weeks for a major one, and 16 weeks where an Environmental Impact Assessment is required. A statutory public consultation of at least 21 days runs inside that window.

Those numbers are real. Treating them as a promise is where developers come unstuck.

On anything genuinely major, the 13-week date is soft. Councils routinely ask for an extension of time, and we agree one on almost every large application, because the alternative is a refusal issued to beat a deadline or an appeal for non-determination that costs more time than it saves. Any consultant who guarantees you a decision inside 13 weeks on a real major scheme is either not doing majors or is about to disappoint you.

The mistake we made ourselves in the early years, and still watch other teams make, is treating the decision notice as the finish line. It is not. A major consent almost always arrives with pre-commencement conditions attached, drainage details, a construction management plan, materials samples, the biodiversity plan, and you cannot lawfully start on site until those are discharged. Build that discharge period into the programme from the day the decision lands, and bring your CDM principal designer duties into the conversation before the spades arrive, not after. We have seen a clean consent sit idle for six weeks because nobody costed the conditions.

What does it actually cost to apply?

The application fee is the small number. For the erection of commercial buildings the current fee is £610 for each 0.1 hectare of the site, up to a cap. These fees rose in December 2023 and are set to rise again on 8 December 2026, so the same application lodged after that date costs more.

What the fee table does not show is the real spend. On a commercial site the technical reports dwarf the application fee: a transport assessment, a flood risk and drainage strategy, ground contamination surveys, a design and access statement, and now a biodiversity assessment. Those are the figures that move a budget, and they are the reason a funder wants an independent eye on the numbers. If a lender is behind the scheme, our independent project monitoring team reports on exactly this before drawdown.

Why is Stockport different from the rest of Greater Manchester?

This is the local point that catches developers who assume Greater Manchester is one planning regime. It is not. Nine of the ten boroughs adopted the joint Places for Everyone plan in March 2024, which gives them an up-to-date development plan to judge applications against. Stockport withdrew from the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework back in December 2020 and sits outside that plan. Its own Local Plan has been paused more than once, most recently in 2024 after the government reopened the National Planning Policy Framework, and adoption is not expected before the middle of 2026. So Stockport has been running without a current adopted local plan while its neighbours have one.

That matters more than it sounds. Where the local plan is out of date, more weight falls on the revised NPPF, published in December 2024, and on the individual material considerations of your site. Two similar schemes a few miles apart, one in Stockport and one in Tameside or Manchester, can be weighed against very different policy footing. On top of that, the Stockport Mayoral Development Corporation leads the Town Centre West regeneration with its own masterplan, and much of the town centre falls inside a conservation area, so a frontage change on Chestergate is a different job from the same change on a business park by the M60. Read the designation before you draw the scheme, not after.

What has changed recently that catches people out?

Biodiversity Net Gain is the big one. Since 12 February 2024, major development in England has had to deliver a measurable 10% net gain in biodiversity, secured and maintained for 30 years, under the Environment Act 2021. It is now a design input from the first sketch, because retro-fitting a habitat plan onto a site you have already packed with floorspace is how you lose developable area late. If your site cannot hold the gain on its own land, you are buying off-site units or statutory credits, and that is a real line in the appraisal.

Thinking about a scheme in the borough? Our construction project management team can pressure-test the programme and the planning route before you commit, and our property consultancy can appraise the site alongside it.

Common questions

Do I need permission to change a shop into offices?
Usually not. Both sit within Class E, so switching a retail unit to office use is not development and needs no planning application, as long as you are not extending or altering a listed building or a shopfront in a conservation area.

How soon can I start on site after a decision?
Not on the day the consent lands. A major permission comes with pre-commencement conditions that have to be formally discharged first, which commonly adds several weeks. Plan for it in the programme rather than treating the decision as your start date.

Is there a fee just to ask the council before I apply?
In most cases yes. Pre-application advice is chargeable and the amount varies by authority and by the size of the scheme. It also adds time before you formally apply, so it earns its place on a complex or sensitive site and is often skippable on a straightforward one.

Talk to us before you draw the scheme

The cheapest planning mistakes to fix are the ones caught before an application is lodged. If you are weighing up a commercial development anywhere from Stockport across the North West, tell us about the site and we will tell you honestly whether it needs permission, what the real timetable looks like, and where the risk sits.

John Ashall is Managing Director at Spring & Co, a construction and property consultancy that has run projects across the North West since 1992.