How to divert a public footpath or road to build

 

You have planning permission, or you are about to apply for it, and there is a public footpath or a strip of road sitting exactly where the building is meant to go. You cannot fence it off and hope nobody minds. A public right of way stays public until somebody with the power to move it says otherwise. This page explains how to divert a public footpath, who has to agree to it, how long it takes and who ends up paying for the work.

There are two separate routes, and which one you need depends on what crosses the land. A footpath, bridleway or restricted byway is handled by your council. A restricted byway is the least familiar of the three: it is open to walkers, to riders on or leading a horse, and to vehicles that are not motorised, such as bicycles and carts, but not to cars and motorbikes. A road, a lane or a pavement is handled by the Secretary of State for Transport instead. Sending the wrong application to the wrong body will cost you months.

Before you start either one, be honest about whether you need to. If the scheme can be drawn so the path stays where it is, that costs nothing and takes no time at all. An order costs money, takes months, and can still be refused at the end of it.

 

 

Check what is really there before you apply

 

Not every worn track across a field is a public right of way, and not every strip of tarmac is a public road. Ask the council’s rights of way team to confirm what is recorded across your land, and ask the highway authority whether the strip in question is a road it maintains. Both answers are free, and both change what you have to do next.

If nothing is recorded, there may be nothing to move. If something is recorded, work out which of the two routes below applies before you spend a penny on an application to divert a public footpath.

 

Who can divert a public footpath, and on what test

 

For a footpath, bridleway or restricted byway, the order is made by the council that granted your planning permission, or that would have had the power to grant it. The council can only make the order if it is satisfied that stopping up or diverting the path is necessary to let the development be carried out in line with that permission. Necessary is a genuine test, and it sits a good deal higher than convenient or tidier.

You do not have to wait for permission before you begin. Once the planning application has been made, the council can make the order in anticipation of permission being granted. What it cannot do is confirm that order until permission has actually been granted and it is satisfied the path really does have to move. Starting early buys you time. It does not buy you the answer.

An order to divert a public footpath can do more than move a line on a plan. It can create the replacement route or improve an existing one, provide for the works, protect the pipes and cables that utility companies have buried under the path, and name the person who has to pay for or contribute towards the cost of the works. That person is normally the developer.

 

Roads and pavements go somewhere else entirely

 

The powers that let a council divert a public footpath do not stretch to a highway. If what crosses the plot is a road, the order is made by the Secretary of State for Transport, and outside Greater London the application goes to the Department for Transport’s National Transport Casework team. The test has the same shape: the Secretary of State has to be satisfied that the stopping up or diversion is necessary to enable the development to be carried out in accordance with the planning permission. Inside a London borough, the borough council makes the order itself.

There is a separate and much narrower power covering roads that cross or join the route of a new or improved highway being built. That one belongs to road schemes, and it will not be the power you need for a house on a plot.

 

The 28 days when anybody can object

 

A path order has to be advertised before it can be confirmed. The council must publish a notice in a local newspaper, display notices at each end of the affected stretch of path and at its own offices, and serve a copy of the order on every owner, occupier and lessee of the land, on the parish or community council, on any National Park authority, and on the utility companies with equipment there. Anybody who has asked to be kept informed about orders of that kind gets told as well.

The notice has to allow at least 28 days for objections, and that is a floor rather than a fixed period. What happens next depends entirely on whether anybody objects:

• nobody objects, or every objection is withdrawn: the council can confirm its own order, but only exactly as advertised and with no changes at all
• a local authority or a National Park authority objects and does not withdraw: the Secretary of State must hold a local inquiry, with no discretion about it
• anybody else objects: the Secretary of State either holds a local inquiry or gives objectors the chance to be heard by an appointed person

Where it goes that far, the decision is normally taken by an inspector appointed for the purpose rather than by the Secretary of State in person, and it counts in law as the Secretary of State’s own decision. None of that is an appeal, and you are not appealing anything. It is simply how an opposed order gets decided.

An order can be confirmed with changes as well as without them, but not in a way that catches land the advertised version never touched. If it has to reach further than that, it goes back out to advertisement with another period of at least 28 days.

 

When you can actually close the path

 

This is the part that catches people out, and it is expensive when it does. An order to divert a public footpath has no effect at all until it is confirmed, and the date written into it for the path to close or move cannot be earlier than confirmation. Until that day arrives the path is still a public right of way, and it has to stay open and usable.

One more thing can hold an order up at the last moment, and it is about the path being closed rather than the new one. Where a utility company has apparatus under, on or across the route being extinguished, the order cannot be confirmed unless that company agrees. Its agreement cannot be unreasonably withheld, and it can be given on condition that the order carries provisions protecting the equipment. If there is an argument about whether a refusal or a demand is reasonable, the relevant government minister settles it.

The reverse case is rarer and slower. If the order would create a new right of way over land covered by a utility company’s own works, or over the ground around them, and the company objects and will not withdraw, the order has to go through a special parliamentary procedure.

 

What it costs

 

This is not a free process, and the money side is easy to underestimate. The order itself can name you as the person who has to pay for or contribute towards the works, and the works mean physically building and signing the replacement route, not just drawing it. Councils also have a power to recover what it costs them to make and advertise an order, so ask yours what it charges before you commit to anything. If the order is opposed and ends up at a local inquiry, the bill grows again.

None of that is the planning fee, which is charged separately. Our planning fees page explains how that side of it works.

 

If it is refused there is no appeal, only the High Court

 

If the council will not make the order, or the Secretary of State will not confirm it, there is nobody to appeal to. This process has no equivalent of a planning appeal.

The only challenge is an application to the High Court, and it is deliberately narrow. You have to show either that the order was outside the power it was made under, or that a procedural requirement was not complied with and your interests were substantially prejudiced as a result. It is not a way of arguing that the decision was simply wrong.

You also need the court’s permission before you can bring the challenge at all, and the application for permission has to be made within six weeks beginning with the day after the relevant date. For a path order, that date is the day the notice of the confirmed order is first published. For a highway order, it is the day the required notice about the order is first published. The court can quash an order in whole or in part, and can suspend it while the case runs.

Refusal of the planning permission behind all this is a different question altogether, and there you do have a proper right of appeal. Our planning appeals section covers that.

 

Two powers that will not help you

 

There is a power to extinguish public rights of way over land that a local authority has bought or appropriated for planning purposes and still holds for those purposes. It only bites on land the council itself holds, it wipes the right out rather than moving it, and it is not the route for somebody with a path across their own plot.

Changing what the official records say about a path, rather than moving the path, is a different process under different legislation and is not covered here.

 

See also

 

See also our guides to the types of planning application, publicity and neighbour consultation, which explains why an application affecting a public right of way is advertised more heavily than most, and planning fees.

 

Diverting a public footpath: relevant legislation

 

Check the “Changes to Legislation” panel on each link below before relying on the text. Several of these provisions carry amendments that are in force only for specified purposes, and others carry Welsh changes that do not apply in England.

• Section 247, Town and Country Planning Act 1990, stopping up or diverting a highway to enable development
• Section 248, highways crossing or entering the route of a proposed new highway
• Section 257, footpaths, bridleways and restricted byways affected by development, the route a council uses
• Section 258, extinguishing rights of way over land held for planning purposes
• Section 259, confirmation of orders made by councils, including the anticipatory order
• Schedule 14, the notice, objection and confirmation procedure for path orders
• Section 287, questioning the validity of an order in the High Court
• National Transport Casework team on GOV.UK, which handles highway orders for the Secretary of State for Transport

Other Planning Application Sections

 

Divert a Public Footpath Page Updated: 15th August 2026