The planning ombudsman: when the council will not act

 

There is no body officially called the ‘planning ombudsman’. The body people usually mean is the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO), which handles complaints about councils in England, including planning complaints. We use the familiar phrase ‘planning ombudsman’ on this page, but it is the LGSCO that actually investigates the complaint.

It is worth being clear at the outset about what it does. The ombudsman looks at how the council behaved, not at whether the planning decision was right. If a neighbour has built something without permission, and the council has looked at it and decided to take no action, the ombudsman will not order the building to come down. If the council took your report, lost it, told you three times it was in hand and then never looked at it at all, that is a very different thing, and that is what the ombudsman is for.

The service is free. You do not need a solicitor to use it.

This page covers England. Wales has its own body, the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, and the English ombudsman cannot look at Welsh matters. This page sits inside our wider guide to planning enforcement.

Whilst we are happy to give you some help via this page, it is often easier to consult a professional. If in doubt – STOP – and reach out to us. We are here to help. Contact us here. 

 

What the planning ombudsman can look at

 

The law gives the ombudsman three things to look for in a planning case. The first is maladministration by the council in the way it carries out its administrative work. The second is a failure in a service the council was supposed to provide. The third is a failure to provide that service at all.

Maladministration is an ugly word for a simple idea. It is not the council reaching a decision you dislike. It is the council going about the job badly. In planning enforcement that usually looks like one of these:

• losing your report, or never passing it to an officer
• ignoring its own complaints procedure or its own enforcement plan
• taking years over a case without ever explaining the delay
• telling you something that was wrong, which you then acted on
• promising to keep you informed and then going silent
• never giving any reason at all for the decision it reached
• failing to consider something it was obliged to consider

The test is the process, not the answer. A council that thinks hard about your report, writes down its reasons and then decides the breach is too minor to chase has done nothing wrong. A council that reaches the same answer by never opening the file has.

 

What the ombudsman cannot do

 

This is where most complaints come unstuck, so it is worth reading twice.

The Act says in terms that nothing in it lets the ombudsman question the merits of a decision the council took, without maladministration, in the exercise of a discretion given to it. Enforcement is one big discretion. The council may take action where it considers it expedient to do so, and it is under no duty to act at all. So the complaint that the council decided not to enforce is, on its own, going nowhere. The complaint that the council decided not to enforce without ever visiting, reading your evidence or recording a reason is a real complaint.

The ombudsman also cannot grant or refuse planning permission, cannot order a building to be demolished, cannot make the council serve a notice, cannot fine the council and cannot discipline an officer. It has no power over your neighbour at all, because your neighbour is not a council.

 

Go to the council first

 

Before it investigates, the ombudsman has to be satisfied that the matter has already been put to the council, and that the council has had a fair chance to look into it and reply. It can waive that where it would not be reasonable to expect you to have gone to the council first, but that is the exception.

In practice you will usually need to go through all stages of the council’s complaints procedure, in writing, and keep the final response. If the council has had a reasonable opportunity to deal with the complaint but has still not provided a final response, the LGSCO says that in most cases up to 16 weeks is a reasonable period before you approach it about the delay.

Our page on how to report a breach of planning control covers what to send the council in the first place, and what happens after a report is made explains how the council is supposed to handle it.

 

The twelve month deadline

 

A complaint must be made in writing, and it must be made within twelve months beginning with the day you first knew about the thing you are complaining about.

Read that again, because it catches people. The clock starts when you first had notice of the matter, not when the council finally answered you. A neighbour who watched an unauthorised building go up three years ago, and who only complained to the council last month, has a problem even if the council’s handling since then has been dreadful.

The ombudsman can set aside either the writing requirement or the deadline in a particular case, and it does sometimes, but that is a favour rather than a right. The safe approach is to start the council’s complaints procedure early, so that twelve months is still comfortably alive when you need the ombudsman.

 

Where you have an appeal, the planning ombudsman usually steps aside

 

The ombudsman is not allowed to investigate where you have, or had, a right of appeal to a tribunal or to a Minister, or a remedy through the courts. It can still investigate if it decides it was not reasonable to expect you to use that route, but the starting point is that it stays out.

For an applicant this matters a great deal. If the council refused your application, or granted it with a condition you cannot live with, your route is a planning appeal, and complaining about the refusal to the ombudsman instead is likely to be turned away. Delay, rudeness, lost documents and broken promises are still fair game, because there is no appeal against those.

For a neighbour it cuts the other way. There is no appeal at all against a council’s decision not to take enforcement action. Nobody can appeal it, and that is exactly why the ombudsman is the main route open to a complainant.

 

What happens if the ombudsman finds fault

 

At the end of an investigation the ombudsman issues a report. The council has to consider it and, within three months, tell the ombudsman what it has done or intends to do.

The remedy is aimed at putting you back where you should have been. In enforcement cases that usually means an apology, a payment for the time, trouble and worry the council caused, and an instruction to go back and make the decision properly this time. The Act specifically allows a council to make a payment or provide some other benefit to a person who has suffered because of what it got wrong.

Note what that last one is and is not. Being told to make the decision properly is not being told what the decision has to be. The council can look at your case again, do it correctly, and still decide to take no action.

 

If the council still does nothing

 

The ombudsman’s recommendations are not a court order, and this is the honest weakness of the system. There is, though, a second stage with real teeth.

If the council does not reply in time, or the ombudsman is not satisfied with what it says it will do, the ombudsman must issue a further report setting out the facts and making recommendations, both to put right the injustice to you and to stop the same thing happening to somebody else.

If the council still will not move, the ombudsman can require it to publish a statement in a local newspaper, in two editions within a fortnight, setting out what it was told to do and has not done. The council may add its reasons if it wants to. If the council refuses to publish, or will not agree the wording within a month, the ombudsman arranges publication itself and sends the council the bill.

Most councils do not want that in their local paper, which is why most of them comply.

 

Is there a cost?

 

Complaining to the ombudsman is free. There is no fee to pay at any stage, and no application form in the planning sense.

The cost is your time, and there is a fair amount of it: the council’s own two stages first, then an investigation that can take many months. You cannot recover the cost of a solicitor or a planning consultant, so most people do it themselves.

Cost only enters if the answer to your problem turns out to be an application rather than a complaint. Applying for permission, or appealing a refusal, carries charges, and our planning fees page sets out where they fall.

 

What if you disagree with the outcome?

 

There is no appeal against an ombudsman decision. It is not a planning decision and it does not go to the Planning Inspectorate.

The ombudsman will usually look again if you can point to a factual error or produce evidence it did not have, and its own published procedure explains how to ask. Beyond that, the only challenge is judicial review of the ombudsman itself, which is expensive, rarely successful and has a very short deadline.

If what you actually want is a different planning outcome rather than a finding about the council’s conduct, the ombudsman was never the right route. An applicant’s route is a planning appeal, and where a notice has already been served our page on enforcement notices and how to appeal sets out the deadlines.

 

Is it worth complaining to the planning ombudsman?

 

Sometimes, and it depends entirely on what you want out of it.

If you want your neighbour’s building taken down, this is the wrong tool and it will cost you a year to find that out. The ombudsman cannot give you that, and even a complaint upheld in full leaves the building standing.

If what you want is for the council to do the job properly, and to be seen to have been made to do it, then the ombudsman is the only real lever a member of the public has. It costs nothing, it is genuinely independent, and councils take its findings seriously because they are published.

One last piece of realism. The ombudsman decides for itself whether to investigate at all, and it can refuse to start, or stop part way, if it is satisfied with what the council has already done or has offered to do. A council that apologises and reopens your case the moment the ombudsman gets in touch has, in a sense, given you what you asked for. That is often what happens, and it is not a bad outcome.

Planning ombudsman relevant legislation

The ombudsman for councils in England is set up by Part III of the Local Government Act 1974, not by any planning Act. Check the “Changes to Legislation” panel at the top of each page below before relying on the wording.

Section 26(1) of the Local Government Act 1974 sets out what can be investigated. It has five paragraphs and these are the three that matter in planning:

For the purposes of section 24A(1)(b), in relation to an authority to which this Part of this Act applies, the following matters are subject to investigation by a Local Commissioner under this Part of this Act—

(a) alleged or apparent maladministration in connection with the exercise of the authority’s administrative functions;

(b) an alleged or apparent failure in a service which it was the authority’s function to provide;

(c) an alleged or apparent failure to provide such a service.

• Local Government Act 1974, s24A: the power to investigate, and the discretion whether to investigate at all
• Local Government Act 1974, s26: what may be investigated, the requirement to go to the council first at subsection (5), and the bar where an appeal or court remedy exists at subsection (6)
• Local Government Act 1974, s26B: complaints in writing, the twelve month period, and the power to disapply both
• Local Government Act 1974, s31: the three month duty to respond, the further report, and publication of a statement in a local newspaper
• Local Government Act 1974, s34: subsection (3), which keeps the merits of a properly taken discretionary decision out of reach
• Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s172: the power to issue an enforcement notice where the council considers it expedient, which is the discretion in question

Other Enforcement Sections

 

 

 

Planning ombudsman Page Updated: 22nd August 2026