A barn lawfulness appeal in Buckinghamshire has failed because photographs, building paperwork and insurance records did not establish when an agricultural barn and polytunnel were substantially completed. The decision is a useful reminder that evidence must identify the actual structures, not merely suggest that something was on the land years ago.
Inspector S Lo dismissed the appeal on 29 October 2026 at land adjoining Long’s Wood, Buckingham Road, Akeley. The owner had sought a certificate of lawful existing use or development for a barn used to store agricultural materials and equipment and a polytunnel used to grow plants and animal feed.
The barn lawfulness appeal raised two distinct questions. Agriculture can be a use that does not itself amount to development, but constructing a barn or polytunnel may still involve operational development requiring permission. The Inspector also found a problem with the submitted plan, which failed to pinpoint the structures for which the certificate was sought.
The barn lawfulness appeal and the dates
The application for a certificate, reference 25/01200/CPE, was made on 16 April 2025 and refused by Buckinghamshire Council on 2 June 2025. The owner argued that the barn had been erected in 2012 and the polytunnel in 2014. If those structures had been completed at those times, the issue would have been whether their construction was already immune from enforcement.
The Inspector examined section 191 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. A certificate of lawfulness is not planning permission, and the merits of the development are not assessed. The applicant has to establish the relevant facts on the balance of probabilities, and the supporting material must be sufficiently precise and unambiguous.
Why the old four-year rule still mattered
One particularly important feature of this barn lawfulness appeal was the transitional enforcement regime. The Inspector applied the former four-year period to operations substantially completed before 25 April 2024, rather than treating the 2024 change to ten years as retrospectively removing an already applicable limitation period.
Because the certificate application was made on 16 April 2025, the Inspector looked for sufficiently reliable evidence that the structures were substantially complete before 16 April 2021. That was the date arising from the four-year period in this case, rather than a general cut-off that can be copied into a different application.
Planning Geek’s guide to certificates of lawfulness and the enforcement time limits explains why the completion date, the date of the application and the transitional rules must be kept separate. All three can matter when choosing the correct evidential period.
An ambiguous building document
The owner submitted a document from TMS Building Services dated 12 September 2012, referring to the erection of a barn, cladding and installation of a roller shutter. But the Inspector could not tell whether the document was an invoice for completed work or a quotation for work yet to be carried out.
That distinction matters. A document with an early date does not by itself prove that the building was substantially complete by that date. In a barn lawfulness appeal, an invoice, site diary, completion record or a photograph showing identifiable stages of construction may each answer different questions, but they need to relate to the structure in dispute.
Why the barn photographs did not settle matters
One photograph from 6 April 2019 showed a large green structure and included location information broadly consistent with the site. The Inspector was not satisfied that it showed the whole barn whose lawfulness was being claimed. A separate image said to come from a 2013 social-media video was indistinct and lacked features reliably connecting it to the site.
An aerial photograph from August 2013 also showed a structure, but the Inspector could not establish whether that was the barn under consideration. In other words, the existence of a building somewhere within a wider holding was not the same as proof of the particular barn’s identity, dimensions and substantial completion.
The polytunnel photographs and insurance evidence
The polytunnel material ran into similar difficulties. One photograph had no date. Images from November 2015 and June 2020 appeared to show polytunnel structures in the background, but it was unclear whether either image captured the structure named in the certificate application.
An NFU Mutual insurance policy referred to a barn and polytunnel at Maids Moreton dating from October 2015. That offered some evidence that structures existed, but it did not establish that the insured structures were the precise ones on the appeal land. In the barn lawfulness appeal, this lack of a secure connection between records and buildings proved decisive.
A site plan must identify what is certified
The Inspector also identified a separate failure in the submitted location plan. It outlined the overall land in red and included a blue pin, but did not clearly locate the barn and polytunnel or define the land and structures that a certificate would cover. Other buildings appeared on recent aerial imagery, adding to the uncertainty.
Section 191 requires a certificate to specify the land to which it relates. Where there are several similar sheds or tunnels, a broad red line around a holding will not necessarily define the actual development with the precision needed for a legally meaningful certificate. This issue would have remained even if some of the photographs had been more persuasive.
The decision and what it does not mean
In his decision, Inspector Lo said the documents and photographs fail to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate
the relevant dates of substantial completion. The quotation comes from the Planning Inspectorate appeal decision, reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The appeal was dismissed and the council’s refusal of the certificate was upheld.
The Inspector did not find that every agricultural use of the structures must be unlawful. He expressly recognised that agricultural use itself falls outside the definition of development under section 55(2)(e). The difficulty was proving the construction of the barn and polytunnel was lawful, and defining exactly what the requested certificate would cover.
For anyone preparing a barn lawfulness appeal, the practical lesson is to construct a structure-by-structure chronology. Identify the buildings on a suitable plan, match every photograph and document to those locations, explain what the evidence shows about construction progress and substantial completion, and resolve inconsistencies before submitting the application.
Appeal details and sources
The decision is APP/J0405/X/25/3371853, dated 29 October 2026, for land adjacent to Long’s Wood, Buckingham Road, Akeley, Buckinghamshire. The original case is listed by the Planning Inspectorate. The appeal decision is also available on AppealBase. There was no separate costs decision in the available appeal record.
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