Our House Extensions Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) will benefit householders and their agents when planning extensions and houses' alterations.

It illustrates the criteria which the Council will usually apply in assessing proposals for house extensions. 

The House Extensions SPD will benefit residents, ward councillors and Parish Councils interested in developments in their area. It provides advice regarding designing domestic extensions to ensure that the neighbourhood character and amenity are maintained. 

We adopted our current House Extensions Guidelines in 2003. While it's a useful and well-used document, it is now out-of-date. It requires revision to reflect current national and local policies better. This clarity will improve assurances to applicants on the likely acceptability of proposals before submission and, in turn, will allow officers and councillors (through the Development Management Committee) to make more robust decisions.  

Therefore, we're proposing to introduce a new, revised set of householder extension guidelines. The current, existing document contains a lot of relevant guidance, so we're not re-writing the whole document. Instead, we're making revisions that will bring it up-to-date.

Benefits of updated householder extension guidelines

• Revising the guidelines provides the opportunity to reflect better issues that are being dealt with daily by our Development Management Team.
• It provides the opportunity to consolidate advice for householders by, for example, including more information on issues such as parking standards, trees and heritage matters. 
• Applicants will be able to submit with more confidence that their proposals meet with the guidance. 
• Our officers will have a firmer basis for their recommendations to ensure good quality, sustainable development.
• It will reduce the need for negotiating improvements to proposed developments, as all parties will have a more specific, up-to-date document.
• It will provide confidence to those involved in the planning process that the right decisions are being reached.

Have your say

Consultation documents

Our draft House Extensions SPD is now subject to formal public consultation, as required by The Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012 and our own Statement of Community Involvement. 

We're keen to know your views on this document and invite you to respond in the following ways:

For general comments, please email us at localplan@warrington.gov.uk or respond by post to:

Planning Policy and Programmes Team
Warrington Borough Council
East Annex
Town Hall
Sankey Street
Warrington
WA1 1UH

• It would be helpful for us to state which page number, paragraph or diagram your comment relates to when you provide your feedback.
• We'll be collating the feedback and documenting the various themes of people's responses.
• We'll use the consultation report to inform the SPD's final version presented to the Cabinet of the Council later in the year for final approval.
• We won't include your contact details in our consultation report, which we'll prepare once the consultation has ended.
• If you have any questions, then please call us on 01925 442826 or email localplan@warrington.gov.uk. We aim to respond to specific questions by email within five working days during the consultation period.

The consultation period is from Friday 12 February until Sunday 14 March 2021.

Planning policy data protection statement

The information you have supplied is being collected in accordance with the Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012 and will be used to inform the preparation and Adoption of the Supplementary Planning Document.

By responding to this consultation, you are accepting that your response will be made available for public inspection and published online in accordance with the Act stated above. However, other personal information such as name, email addresses and telephone numbers will not be published or shared with third parties, and will only be used to contact you regarding the consultation. Your personal information will be held only as long as necessary in line with the Council’s data retention schedule.

Data will be processed and held securely and in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK General Data Protection Regulation (and any updates).

For more information on how we handle your personal data, please read our Privacy Notice.