Who applies for the planning permission?

Applicant and agent are two separate boxes

Every planning application form asks for both, and people fill them in wrongly more often than you would expect.

The applicant is the person or people seeking the permission. The permission, if granted, is granted to that name. The agent is whoever is acting on the applicant’s behalf, and the important consequence is that where an agent is named, all correspondence from the council goes to the agent and not to the applicant.

That is fine when the agent is an architect who reads their email. It is a problem when the agent is somebody who has since finished their part of the job, because a request for further information sent to a dormant address is a request nobody answers, and the application is refused for want of a reply that would have taken five minutes.

If you name an agent, confirm they will still be engaged through to decision. If they will not, name yourself and take the correspondence.

You do not have to own the roof to apply

This surprises people, and it is settled law. Anyone may apply for planning permission on any land. There is no requirement to own it, hold an interest in it, or have any prospect of acquiring it.

What the system requires instead is notice. If you are not the sole owner of everything in the red line, you must give written notice to those who are, and declare that you have done so. Ownership does not gate the application; it gates the paperwork.

The reason this matters on a rooflight is that permission attaches to the land rather than to the applicant. A permission obtained by a seller is available to a buyer, and a permission obtained by a prospective buyer before exchange is available to them after completion. Neither has to be reapplied for on a change of hands.

The ownership certificate and what you are signing

Every application carries a certificate about ownership, and it is a declaration, not a formality.

Certificate A says you own the whole of the application site and nobody else needs notifying. It is the correct answer for a freehold house in single ownership, which describes most rooflight applications. The other certificates cover the cases where other owners exist and have been notified, or where owners cannot be traced and a notice has been published.

“Owner” for these purposes includes a leaseholder with a long unexpired term, which is why a flat owner and a freeholder frequently both count. Getting the certificate wrong is not a slip to shrug at. Knowingly or recklessly issuing a false certificate is an offence, and separately it gives anybody who should have been notified grounds to challenge the permission afterwards.

Leasehold flats, where the freeholder sits above everything

A top-floor flat has no permitted development right for a rooflight, so an application is always needed, and the ownership question then arrives immediately.

The leaseholder can be the applicant. The freeholder, as owner of the building and normally of the roof structure itself, must be given notice. And quite separately from planning, the lease almost certainly requires the freeholder’s written consent for structural alteration, which the council has no power to grant or override.

Sequence this properly. Establish the freeholder’s position in principle first, then apply. A planning permission for a rooflight the lease forbids is a permission you cannot use, and the fee, the drawings and the three months are gone.

Rented houses, and the tenant who wants the light

A tenant may apply, giving notice to the landlord as owner. In practice landlords apply, because they are the ones who will hold the building afterwards and the ones the lender and insurer answer to.

Where a tenant is driving the work, the cleanest arrangement is that the landlord is the applicant, the landlord holds the permission, and the funding arrangement between them sits in a separate written agreement. It keeps the planning record aligned with the title, which is what a solicitor will be reading in ten years.

Joint owners, executors and buyers not yet completed

Three variations that come up regularly across Oxfordshire.

Joint owners. Name all of them as applicants. One spouse applying alone can still use Certificate A only if they truly own the whole title; where the title is joint, both names belong on the form.

Executors and probate. Personal representatives can apply in respect of a property in an estate. Applications are frequently made during probate to establish what is possible before a sale, and the resulting permission passes with the house.

Buyers before completion. A prospective buyer may apply, serving notice on the current owner. It is a reasonable way to know before exchange whether a loft room with light is achievable, and vendors sometimes agree to it as part of the negotiation. It requires the seller’s cooperation only to the extent of receiving the notice, not their consent.

Who draws it is not who applies

The person producing the drawings, an architect, an architectural technician, a measured survey firm, is often named as agent because they are the natural correspondent during determination. That is convention rather than requirement.

A planning consultant is a different role again, and worth engaging where the case is genuinely contested: a listed building, an earlier refusal, a front elevation in a designated area. They write the case rather than draw it, and on a marginal listed application that is what decides the outcome.

Neither of them is your installer. An installer’s contribution is technical: the manufacturer and model, the frame dimensions, the published projection above the plane of the slope, the flashing or kerb detail, and how the covering terminates against the unit. That information belongs in the application. Submitting it is somebody else’s job.

Why we stay out of the applicant’s chair

Our scope is narrow on purpose. Heritage Skylights installs and replaces rooflights, and that is all we do.

Acting as your agent would mean signing declarations about your ownership, taking correspondence that decides your application, and carrying responsibility for a determination we do not control. Firms that offer it as a free extra have an interest in the answer, and an installer with an interest in the answer is the wrong person to be telling a council what your roof looks like.

What we will do, before you apply and at no charge, is establish whether an application is needed at all: whether the address is on the national list, whether an Article 4 direction is in force, and whether a condition in the planning history removed Part 1 rights. Where the answer is that you need no application and no agent, we say so, and that is a sentence we say often.

What the applicant carries after the decision

The permission is granted to the applicant and it comes with obligations that stay with them.

Conditions must be read and complied with, and conditions requiring details to be approved before work begins are common on listed buildings. A permission must ordinarily be implemented within three years or it lapses. Any departure from the approved drawings is unauthorised development however small it looks on a roof, so if the unit changes, the application should change with it before installation rather than after.

And the decision notice is a document to keep. It is what closes the enquiry at sale, alongside the Building Control certificate. On a listed building the consent matters more than anything else in the file, because unauthorised work to a listed building is a criminal offence with no time limit, and a sale is exactly when its absence is discovered.