Planning Contravention Notice (PCN)

A planning contravention notice (almost always shortened to PCN) is a formal request for information from your council. It lands when the local planning authority suspects a breach of planning control on your land and wants the facts before deciding what, if anything, to do about it. It is issued under section 171C of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.

Two things make a PCN different from the informal letters a council might send first. It carries a hard 21-day deadline, and ignoring it, or answering it dishonestly, is a criminal offence. That combination is why a PCN should never go to the bottom of the pile. But it also is not, by itself, enforcement action: no notice is telling you to stop or undo anything yet. It is the council gathering information, and how you handle it can shape everything that follows.

This page explains what a PCN is, what it can ask, the penalties for getting your response wrong, and how to respond sensibly. It sits within our wider planning enforcement guidance. If the notice arrived after somebody reported you, our page on being reported to planning enforcement covers the wider picture and what to do first.

What a Planning Contravention Notice (PCN) is, and what it is not

A Planning Contravention Notice (PCN) is an information-gathering tool. Under section 171C the council can serve it on the owner or occupier of the land, on anyone with another interest in it, or on anyone actually carrying out operations or using the land. Its purpose is to let the authority find out what is going on before it decides whether a breach has occurred and whether acting on it would be expedient.

It helps to be clear about what a PCN is not. It is not an enforcement notice, a stop notice or a breach of condition notice: it does not require you to cease anything or remove anything. Serving a PCN is entirely optional for the council and does not count as “taking enforcement action”, so a PCN is not the council committing itself to a fight. That also means it does not stop the clock: the enforcement time limits keep running while the council reads your answer. The same is true of the narrower section 330 notice, which asks only who owns, occupies or receives rent for the land, and which can be used for listed building matters where a PCN cannot. It is also not available for every kind of breach: a PCN cannot be used for suspected breaches of listed building control, conservation area control, hazardous substances control or protected trees. For those, the council has other routes.

Because it is only a request for information, a Planning Contravention Notice is sometimes the moment a situation can be quietly resolved: a well-judged response can head off formal action altogether. Equally, a careless one can hand the council the evidence it needs. That is the tension to hold in mind.

What a PCN can ask you

The questions can be wide-ranging. Section 171C allows the notice to require you, so far as you are able, to give information about any operations, use or activities on the land, and about any planning conditions or limitations attached to a permission. In practice a PCN will typically ask you to:

• state whether the land is being used for a particular purpose, or whether particular operations or activities are being carried out
• say when a use, operation or activity began
• give the name and address of anyone you know to use, occupy or have an interest in the land
• set out what interest you yourself hold in the land, and who else holds one
• explain the reasons, so far as you know them, why a planning permission or condition point is said to apply

The notice can also invite you to make an offer (for example to apply for permission, to stop an activity, or to carry out remedial works) and to make representations at a stated time and place. That invitation is worth reading carefully: it is an opening for dialogue, not just interrogation.

A notice is rarely the whole of an investigation. The council can also enter land to see the position for itself, and our guide to how a planning enforcement investigation works explains those powers and their limits.

The 21-day clock and the penalties

You must respond within 21 days of the notice being served. Miss that deadline and you commit an offence under section 171D, punishable on summary conviction by a fine of up to level 3 on the standard scale, currently £1,000. The offence can be charged again for continued non-compliance, so ignoring a PCN does not make it go away; it compounds.

Answering dishonestly is treated far more seriously. Making a statement you know to be false or misleading in a material particular, or being reckless as to whether it is, is a separate offence under section 171D, and on summary conviction the fine is up to level 5 on the standard scale, which for offences of this kind is unlimited. In blunt terms: the law punishes a false answer much harder than a late one. If a question is difficult, the safe course is a careful, truthful answer, not a convenient one.

There is one important safeguard. It is a defence to the late-response offence to show you had a reasonable excuse for not complying. That is a genuine protection where, for instance, a notice never reached you, but it is not a licence to sit on a Planning Contravention Notice, and it should not be relied on as a plan.

There is also a money consequence that is easy to miss. If the council later serves a stop notice and you would otherwise have been entitled to compensation, you cannot recover any loss you could have avoided by answering this notice or co-operating. The notice you were sent has to warn you of that, so it is worth reading its small print.

Please note that a PCN will be sent to the property. If you do not live there, the clock may well have started to tick by the time the letter is forwarded to you. So check carefully. If the date has gone, reply asap and explain as to why it is late.

Should you just answer it yourself?

Sometimes, yes. If the position is straightforward and the honest answers do you no harm, a clear and prompt reply may resolve matters, and councils often prefer to work a problem out rather than escalate. But a PCN is also the point at which people accidentally talk themselves into trouble, because an honest answer to a badly-understood question can hand the council the very date or fact that starts enforcement running.

If in any doubt – STOP – seek help – Planning Geek is here to guide and support you. Reach out to us via this page. A zoom call might be an option.

So the sensible instinct is: do not ignore it, do not rush it, and think before you write. Acknowledge receipt if you need to, but avoid volunteering commentary or admissions beyond what is actually asked. Where the answers are not obviously harmless, and dates of use, occupation history or the lawfulness of what you have done are in play, take advice before you reply. This is exactly the kind of situation where professional help earns its keep, and it is what the enforcement team at Planning Geek does day in, day out.

What usually comes next

A PCN is a fork in the road, not the end of it. Depending on your answers and the council’s view, several things can follow. The authority may decide there is no breach, or none worth pursuing, and take the matter no further. It may keep working with you informally towards a fix. Or it may move to formal action, most commonly an enforcement notice, and in urgent cases a stop notice.

One route surprises people. If the council starts to think an offence has been committed, it may ask you in for an interview under caution. Answering a PCN is not an interview and carries no caution, which is precisely why the two get confused, and the difference matters a great deal.

Which of those happens often turns on whether the alleged breach is even still capable of being enforced against, and that depends on how long it has been going on. The time limits are the single most misunderstood part of enforcement, and they are set out on our enforcement time limits page. If formal action does follow, our guides to enforcement notices and how to appeal and to stop notices and breach of condition notices explain the routes and the deadlines. Where the council thinks a breach might still get permission, it can send an enforcement warning notice first. Where the real problem is the state of the land rather than the building work, it may use a section 215 notice instead. And where a condition on an existing permission has been ignored, the route is a breach of condition notice.

Is there a cost?

Responding to a Planning Contravention Notice carries no council fee: it is a notice served on you, not an application you make. The real cost, where there is one, is the professional advice you may sensibly take before replying, and later the cost of any application the situation pushes you towards. If the way to resolve matters is to regularise what has been done, that may mean an application for a certificate of lawfulness or for retrospective permission, and application fees are set nationally and change from time to time; our guide to planning application fees explains how they work. Weighed against a level 5 fine for a false answer, early advice is rarely the expensive option.

Can you appeal a PCN?

No, and this catches people out. There is no right of appeal against a planning contravention notice, because it does not decide anything or require you to act; it only asks for information. Your “response” to a PCN is your answer to its questions, not an appeal. The appeal rights come later, if and when the council takes formal enforcement action: an enforcement notice can be appealed to the Planning Inspectorate under section 174, and our planning appeals guide sets out those routes and their deadlines. The point to take from this page is simpler: deal with the PCN properly now, and keep the later options open.

See also our guide to the planning enforcement process.

Planning Contravention Notice relevant legislation

The primary sources below are on legislation.gov.uk. Check the “Changes to Legislation” panel at the top of each page for any amendments not yet incorporated into the revised text.

• Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s171C: power to require information (the PCN)
• Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s171D: penalties for non-compliance and false statements
• Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s171A: what counts as a breach of planning control

Other Enforcement Sections

Planning Contravention Notice Page Updated: 16th August 2026