Conservation areas, listed buildings and balcony solar

What Part 14 permits

The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, Schedule 2, Part 14 is where domestic solar sits. Two classes matter here.

Class A — equipment on a building. It permits the installation, alteration or replacement of microgeneration solar PV equipment on a dwellinghouse or a block of flats, or on a building within its curtilage. Flats are expressly in scope, which is more than can be said for most rules in this area. The limits include:

• the equipment must not protrude more than 0.2 metres beyond the plane of the wall or the roof slope
• on a pitched roof it must not sit higher than the highest part of the roof, excluding a chimney; on a flat roof, not more than 0.6 metres above it
• in a conservation area or World Heritage Site, it must not be installed on a wall which fronts a highway
• it does not extend to a listed building’s curtilage structures or to scheduled monuments

Two conditions attach: the equipment must, so far as practicable, be sited to minimise its effect on the external appearance of the building and on the amenity of the area, and it must be removed as soon as reasonably practicable when no longer needed.

Class B — stand-alone solar within the curtilage. One installation per curtilage, no more than 4 metres high, at least 5 metres from the boundary, with a panel area no greater than 9 square metres. In a conservation area the height limit drops to 2 metres where it would be nearer to a highway.

Class B is a poor fit for a balcony — the “curtilage” of a flat is not usually a balcony, and the 5-metre boundary distance is unachievable on one. It is included here because it is the class people are pointed to when they say “free-standing”.

The 0.2 metre limit is the one to measure

For a balcony installation, the protrusion limit is the condition most likely to bite and the one nobody checks. A panel on a bracket angled off a wall or railing can easily stand more than 0.2 metres proud of the plane of the wall.

That is a limit on how far the equipment sticks out, not on the panel’s size. If you are mounting flat against a wall, you have room. If you are angling a panel out to catch more sun — which the generation figures encourage — measure it.

Conservation areas: the wall that fronts a highway

The restriction is specific. It is not that solar is banned in a conservation area, and it is not about visibility in general. It is about a wall which fronts a highway.

For a terraced house or a flat whose balcony faces the street, that is the condition to work through. For a rear balcony over a garden, it is usually not engaged. “Highway” is broader than most people assume and includes footpaths, so a side elevation onto a public path may count.

If your balcony faces the street and you are in a conservation area, this is a question for the council’s planning or conservation officer, not for us — and it is worth asking before you buy rather than after.

Listed buildings: a different order of risk

Two things make this unlike the conservation area case.

First, the consequence. Carrying out works to a listed building that affect its character as a building of special interest, without consent, is a criminal offence — not a matter of retrospective permission. That is a genuinely different risk from getting a planning judgement wrong.

Second, “listed” attaches to the whole building including the interior and often attached structures, so a balcony balustrade on a listed block may itself be listed. Fixing a bracket to it is exactly the kind of alteration that needs consent.

The question the documents do not answer

Part 14 permits the installation of equipment on a dwellinghouse. Planning control applies to development, which for these purposes means building works or a material change of use.

So: is standing a ballasted panel on your own balcony floor, plugged into an existing socket, with nothing fixed to the building, development at all?

There is a real argument that it is not — no more than putting a parasol or a bicycle out there. The specification even requires that any attachment method be “reversible and non-permanent”. If nothing is attached and nothing is altered, the thing planning law regulates has arguably not happened.

We have not found a decision, an appeal or a piece of guidance addressing this for plug-in solar, and we are not going to tell you it is settled. What we would say is that the two cases are genuinely different, and that anyone flatly asserting “you need planning permission for balcony solar” is not distinguishing between them either.

What we could not confirm

Whether an unfixed device is development. As above. This is the central question on this page and it is open.

Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Order quoted here is the England order. The other nations have their own permitted development regimes, and we have not researched them. If you are outside England, treat this page as background only.

Whether Article 4 directions are being used against plug-in solar. An Article 4 direction can withdraw permitted development rights in a defined area. We found no evidence of one aimed at plug-in solar, but they are made locally and we could not survey them.

What conservation officers will actually say. Nobody has published a position that we could find. If you get a written answer from a local authority, please tell us — a handful of real replies would make this page substantially more useful than the legislation alone.