Certificate of Lawfulness
A certificate of lawfulness is not a legal requirement unlike planning permission, however it is a certificate issued by your local authority saying your proposed loft conversion complys within permitted development rights. You may wish to apply for a certificate even if you do not require planning permission as this may aid the sale of your property.
An application will still need to go to the planning department, the council give an 8 week deadline to process the application. You can go online to your local authorities website and download the application forms, or alternatively you can apply via the Planning portal. You will also need to attach a copy of your drawings in PDF format. If you are applying for the Certificate yourself,your Architect/Loft company should be able to provide you with the PDF drawings, and a payment of £67.50 is required you can send this seperately in a cheque by post, or pay online by credit card.
Once your application has been received, the planning admin department will then subject it to various checks, in order to validate it. Once it has been made valid, the 8 weeks will start, and the application is passed to a case officer.
You can contact the planning department and ask for the application reference number e.g. Ref:2006/5647, and the decision date, and the case officers name and contact details.
The case officer will need to undertake a site visit in order to confirm there are no extensions to the property that have not been declared in the application,or garages or sheds within 5 metres of the property. This is because these will be included within your permitted development allowance. Many people may be more than willing to remove a garage etc in order to achieve a larger loft conversion. If this is the case the council will need to see you have removed it prior to their site visit, or preferably removed before the application is submitted to the council, this is because the case officer may not make you aware of when their site visit may be.
As long as the council are happy everything complies they will issue the Certificate, and send you a copy of this in the post for you to keep for your records, and this will also be saved in the councils planning database.
Please be aware if you are submitting the application yourself, you need to be aware that you cannot raise the ridge height within permitted development, or build on the party walls and different types of properties have different amounts of allowances they can extend until. For example a typical mid terrace has 50 cubic metres to use over the entire property of which 40 cubic metres can be used within their loft. If you have built an extension, you will need to find out the volume and deduct it from your overall allowance. You can also ask your architect to do this, as they would have taken the dimensions when undertaking the survey. Just be aware the size you will achieve in the loft maybe alot less than you had hoped, therefore it may be better to apply for planning permission. You can also search your local authorities planning database in your area and street, and see what else has been granted under planning permission to give you a better idea.