- A planning permission almost always arrives with conditions attached, and a number of those must be discharged before you start, not before you finish.
- Building on a pre-commencement condition that has not been discharged means building without permission. Enforcement is the risk; a retrospective application is the cost.
- Discharge is not a formality. The statutory period is eight weeks, the clock only starts once the submission is validated, and authorities routinely run past it.
- Building control is a separate regime, running in parallel and answering to different rules. Satisfying one does not satisfy the other.
- The programme that gets built is rarely the programme that was priced, and conditions are usually the reason.
The decision notice arrives, the deal completes, and the assumption is that the hard part is over. It is not. What has actually happened is that the local authority has agreed to your scheme in principle, and attached a list of things you must satisfy before, during and after construction. Read a decision notice properly and the permission is usually the shortest part of it.
The distinction that costs money is pre-commencement
Conditions come in three broad types. Some must be discharged before you start on site. Some before you occupy. Some run for the life of the development. It is the first group that stops schemes, because starting work before they are discharged is not a paperwork slip. It means the development is unauthorised, and the permission itself can be compromised.
Contamination surveys, drainage strategies, construction management plans, archaeology, ecology. Individually reasonable, collectively a programme in their own right. The mistake is treating them as administration to be handled by someone else while the real work gets under way, when in fact they are the critical path.
Planning permission is not consent to build. It is consent to build once you have satisfied the conditions.
Discharge takes real time, and the clock is not yours
A council has eight weeks to determine an application to discharge conditions. Treat that as the best case rather than the plan. The clock only starts once the submission is validated, so an incomplete application quietly adds weeks before it has even begun. Authorities routinely run past the statutory period, and there is very little you can do about it. Chasing helps at the margin; it does not create officer capacity.
Where a condition needs a consultee, you inherit another organisation's timetable as well. Highways, the lead local flood authority, the water undertaker, the conservation officer, each with their own queue and their own priorities, none of which are yours.
And discharge can be refused. A drainage strategy that does not satisfy the flood authority comes back for redesign, and when you resubmit the eight weeks starts over.
Building control is a separate conversation entirely
This is the point at which most developers, including experienced ones, lose time. Planning decides whether you may build. Building regulations decide whether what you have built is safe and compliant. They are different regimes, with different officers, different tests and different evidence.
Overheating, acoustics, water efficiency, fire performance of the roof covering, ventilation, floor span tables, gigabit connectivity, electric vehicle provision. Each is its own submission with its own supporting evidence, and several depend on a consultant who priced the job months earlier.
Treat that as a checklist you reach at the end and you will find a dozen items landing in the same week, every one of them holding up sign-off, several needing information from someone you stopped paying two months ago.
What this means for the programme, and the money
Every one of these has a cost that never appears in a build cost per square foot. Finance runs whether you are on site or waiting for a consultee. Preliminaries run whether the crane is turning or not. A three-month delay to discharge is three months of interest, three months of site set-up, and a sales period that has moved into a different market.
The appraisal that priced the scheme assumed a start date. Conditions are the commonest reason that date moves, and the appraisal is rarely revisited once it has done its job of getting the deal approved.
What to do instead
Read the conditions on the day the decision notice arrives, not the day before you want to start. Split them into pre-commencement, pre-occupation and ongoing, and put a date and a named owner against every one. A condition without an owner is a condition nobody is discharging.
Run building control as a parallel workstream from day one, with the same discipline. Ask the design team which items need third-party evidence and commission those early, while the consultants are still engaged and still interested.
Then build the discharge period into the programme and the appraisal honestly. A scheme that assumes work starts the week after consent is not optimistic. It is wrong, and everyone involved will spend the next six months paying for that assumption.
The permission is a starting gun with conditions attached
Nobody celebrates the day the last pre-commencement condition is discharged, but that is the day the scheme can actually begin. Treat the conditions as the programme, because they are.
Have a scheme reviewed
If you have a consent in hand and are not certain where the programme risk sits, bring the decision notice. I will tell you honestly which conditions are on the critical path, what they are likely to cost you in time, and where the building control pack needs starting now rather than later.