Pre-application advice is the planning system’s standard piece of received wisdom. Take it. Listen to the officer. Build the relationship. The trouble with the advice is that the data on whether it actually helps is more borough-specific than most developers realise.
Across 1,154 small-site planning applications in 20 London boroughs, schemes that took up pre-app are approved at 19.7%. Schemes that didn’t are approved at 51.1%. The figures look bad for pre-app. They aren’t quite saying what they look like.
The borough-by-borough picture
The headline gap is borough-specific, and the variance is the useful part:
One hundred Croydon small-site schemes took up pre-app. Zero were approved. In Enfield and K&C, the same exercise lifts approval rates by 6 to 14 percentage points. Same procedure, very different outcomes, depending on which side of the borough boundary the site sits.
Show the underlying figures
| Borough | With pre-app | Without | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enfield | 66.7% | 53.0% | +14pp |
| Kensington and Chelsea | 72.7% | 66.7% | +6pp |
| Havering | 30.0% | 27.5% | +2.5pp |
| Lewisham | 32.4% | 33.3% | −1pp |
| Brent | 0.0% | 40.3% | −40pp |
| Croydon | 0.0% | 50.7% | −51pp |
The Croydon picture, looked at properly
One hundred schemes in Croydon took up pre-app. None were approved. Of those one hundred refusal reports, 81 explicitly state that pre-application advice was given and was not adopted. The schemes were then refused on the same issues officers had flagged: parking and refuse provision, neighbour overlooking, scale and massing, design quality, missing legal agreements. Pre-app worked, but the response did not.
A 5-unit demolish-and-rebuild in Coulsdon, refused on excessive massing and overlooking. A 7-unit scheme in Selhurst, refused on housing mix and bulk. A 9-unit scheme in Sanderstead, refused on the same housing mix shortfall plus "visually dominant and out of keeping with the established pattern of development". The pre-app advice in each case is implicit in the refusal: the council asked for fewer units or a different form, the developer filed unchanged, the council refused on the original ground and added the non-compliance with pre-app advice as a strengthening factor. Abortive consultant and architect fees on a small-site scheme that reaches refusal at this stage typically run between £15,000 and £25,000, plus the carry on a holding facility for the months it takes to get the decision.
Three issues account for most of these refusals: housing mix below the borough’s family-homes threshold, scale or massing above the local pattern, and parking or refuse provision below standard. Each is something a developer can either build into the scheme upfront, or reject the site over. Filing the original scheme through pre-app and back into formal application without addressing these three is the option Croydon’s data is reliably unkind to.
The categories above are not unique to Croydon. Across all 33 London boroughs, three quarters of small-site refusal reasons fall into a handful of design-codifiable categories. We hold the breakdown for every borough and every scheme type. The patterns are public goods: they are what officers are quietly applying when they sign decisions. The work of crafting a scheme that fits them is what a Site Assessment is for — and what a developer would want to do before the council’s pre-app feedback turns into a written paper trail.
Your borough’s headline pattern is in the free dashboards at /boroughs/. The refusal-reason taxonomy and the per-site-type approval rates are in there too.
What this means for the next site
If a borough is one where pre-app demonstrably refines schemes (Enfield, K&C, Havering, Lewisham on present evidence), take it and amend accordingly. If it is one where pre-app produces a paper trail of unresolved concerns (Croydon, Brent), the realistic options are: redesign so the scheme matches the local pattern before any pre-app, sell the site, or appeal the principle of a smaller scheme with proper evidence. Filing unchanged is the option the figures argue against.
Most developers don’t notice this borough-specific pattern, because they’re working from a sample of one or two recent schemes. The aggregate isn’t useful. The per-borough figure on a per-site-type basis is what is, and it’s hard to assemble without somebody having coded the dataset first.
Before you commit to a site, know what your borough actually approves.
A Site Assessment delivers, in 48 hours, the same dataset cut for a specific London address: approval rates on schemes like yours, refusal-reason patterns to design around, capacity model for the unit count and density the borough has actually approved on similar sites. £1,250 per site, recovered in full the first time it flags a scheme that wouldn’t have got through.
Buy a Site Assessment → Or see a £125 sample first
Or browse the free borough dashboards at /boroughs/ for the headline pattern in your borough. All 33 boroughs, refreshed quarterly, no sign-up.