The planning applications that mean a building is about to spend

Will, Founder of Locarum. 16 October 2026.

Most work inside a commercial building in England needs no planning permission. So most of what you sell, if you sell fit-out, lighting, controls, fire and security or facilities services, never appears in a council’s planning register. The applications that do appear are often the bigger jobs. They tell you who is running the work and roughly when it will start.

Firms that sell planning leads tend to send every application as it comes in. For a seller to commercial buildings that is mostly noise. In April to June 2026, half of all planning decisions in England were for homeowners’ extensions. In the year to June 2026, councils decided 6,200 applications for offices, industry, warehouses and shops. This guide is about finding the ones among those that mean money is about to be spent, and knowing when.

What doesn’t need permission

In planning law, work that only affects the inside of a building isn’t development, so it needs no permission. A new fit-out, new lighting, new controls and plant inside the building all go ahead without an application. Since 2020 shops, offices, cafés, gyms and light industry have been one use class, so a building can change from one to another without an application too.

Most solar panels on a commercial roof need no application either, however many there are, provided they sit low on the roof and away from its edge. Most chargers in a car park don’t need one. So the register shows only part of what a building spends, and it is the outside part.

What does, and what each tells you

The work that changes how a building looks from outside needs permission. New windows or a new shopfront, plant or louvres on the roof, an extension and recladding all come with an application. An air source heat pump at a commercial building usually needs full permission too, unlike one at a home. A large solar array needs the council’s “prior approval” before it goes up, and that request is in the register as well.

Listed buildings are the exception that matters most. Work inside a listed building needs listed building consent if it affects its character, and new lighting, wiring or ventilation often does. So at a listed building, the register shows inside jobs it would never show elsewhere.

An application to turn offices or shops into homes tells you something different. The building is about to leave the commercial market. If you service it today, you probably won’t next year.

When the work starts

A council has 8 weeks to decide an ordinary application and 13 weeks for a major one. In practice most major decisions take longer by agreement: in April to June 2026 only 19% were made in 13 weeks. Once permission is granted, the work has to start within three years.

So a decision tells you the work is allowed, not that it is about to happen. The better sign comes after it. Most permissions come with conditions, and some of them must be met before any work begins, such as approving the materials or a plan for managing the building site. The owner applies to “discharge” those conditions, and the law says that has to happen before work starts. An application to discharge conditions on a scheme that already has permission is a sign that work is close. It is easy to miss, because it doesn’t describe the work again, only the conditions.

Who to contact

Every application names the applicant, and most name an agent. The applicant is usually the owner, a tenant doing the work or a developer. The agent is usually an architect, a surveyor or a planning consultant running the job, and they often help choose who supplies it.

In my view the agent is often the better first contact. They know the timetable and the specification, and they can put you in front of the client at the right moment. Write to the firm, not to a named person found on the form. A person’s name is personal data, and councils often remove individuals’ contact details for that reason.

Reading the description

Every application has a one-line description, and that is where most of the value is. It is written by the applicant or their agent, and it tends to name the things you would sell.

A typical description reads something like this. The building is invented.

Replacement of existing windows, installation of two air source heat pumps and associated plant enclosure at roof level, and alterations to the ground floor entrance. Albion House, 14 Market Street.

That is a building getting new windows, new heating and a new entrance, all at once. Someone is planning a refit and has a budget for it. If the inside is being done at the same time, and it often is, none of that inside work will show up anywhere else.

Where to look

Every council has to keep its planning register open to the public, and almost all of them put it online. You can search it free by address, by street or by the date applications were received. There is no single national list: the government’s planning data site has a dataset for applications, but it is marked incomplete and is empty.

Council websites have their own terms, and some forbid copying their data into a commercial database. Searching a council’s register for your own prospecting is what it is there for. Read the terms before you copy anything in bulk.

See the signs as they happen

Locarum reads councils’ planning applications every day and picks out the ones that mention the work you sell. Each one is shown beside the building’s owner, its managing agent and the other signs at the same address, such as an empty unit or a new energy certificate, with its source and date.

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