Pre-application advice

Benefits of pre-application advice 

We will provide you with initial advice on your proposal and can tell you what you need to submit for a planning application. Providing this information will avoid delays in the future.

If you are proposing new homes and want to request an allocation of special protection area mitigation, this must be explained at the pre-application stage.

Any advice we give before, or while we are considering an application, will be without prejudice to the outcome of any future planning application.

Charges for our pre-application advice service

Our planning officers are available to provide some initial advice over phone. However, if you want us to provide a written response, review submitted draft schemes or meet to discuss proposals, you will need to pay a charge in advance. All charges include VAT. 

Fee exemptions for charities

We will only charge local charities the minimum householder fee for pre-application enquiries, if you meet the following criteria:

• You are a registered charity
• Have a headquarters in Rushmoor
• Are involved in an activity which serves the people of Rushmoor
• Are not part of a national charity with multiple UK or international offices

Apply for pre-application advice

Please send what you are proposing to do and request pre-application advice to plan@rushmoor.gov.uk.

The more detail you can provide about your proposal, the more detailed our response can be. As a minimum we need an address and sketches of your proposal.

We also have a pre-application householder form for you to fill in, if you are a householder.

We aim to respond within 4 weeks however, more complex schemes can take longer and require a custom timetable which we will agree with you.

Payment

You will need to pay the above pre-application fee before we will provide you with this service. Please visit our planning payments system to send us your fee.

Bespoke Planning Performance Agreement

This is an agreement between the us and you, as the pre-applicant. This includes timescales and a fee to cover the cost of providing this service.

To submit a pre-application that has a bespoke Planning Performance Agreement, please provide details of your proposal via plan@rushmoor.gov.uk and we will get in contact with you.

What's included in the pre-application advice

Unless stated otherwise in the charges table above, we will visit the site and provide a written response about your proposal.

Our response will detail:

• The main planning considerations
• If the proposal would comply with the relevant planning policies
• Any concerns with the proposal
• Responses from our internal consultees

Unless stated otherwise in the charges table above, the fees include one meeting.

Internal consultees

Our responses will not include highways comments. There is separate pre-application service from Hampshire County Council’s Highways team.

Confidentiality and freedom of information

We carry out pre-application discussion with potential applicants on a 'without prejudice' basis and we understand that the expectation of those seeking it is that the advice we provide is in confidence and outside the formal planning process.

However, pre-application discussion does not fall within any 'absolute' exemption under FOI legislation. It is considered to be a 'qualified' exemption, which means that any request to provide such information must be subject to a test of consideration, where the public interest in transparency must be balanced against the public interest in it remaining confidential. This is in line with the provisions of Section Two of the Freedom of Information Act and the advice of the Information Commissioner's Office.

In our view, we are serving the 'public good' by providing pre-application advice to potential developers, which can help them to refine or develop a satisfactory development scheme before deciding whether to, and/or how, to submit a formal application. If such discussions do result in an application, the details of it would be in the public domain and the application would be the subject of statutory notification through which interested parties could obtain full details and have their views considered.

Our view is that, on balance, the public good of providing confidential and 'without prejudice' pre-application discussions outweighs that of transparency about the privacy or commercial confidentiality of enquirers, particularly as any consideration of a resulting planning application will take place in the public domain.

We will be obliged to apply this test on a case-by-case basis when considering any Freedom of Information request about pre-application discussion of a particular site. It would, therefore, help us if, when submitting a pre-application request, you indicate that you want the discussions to remain confidential and give reasons why you feel this should be the case. If we conclude that the discussion should remain confidential, we would neither confirm nor deny if any pre-application discussions had taken place.