Temporary stop notice: 56 days to stop work

 

A temporary stop notice is the fastest thing a council can do about a suspected breach of planning control. It does not warn you first, it does not ask you to explain yourself, and it does not wait for anyone to agree with it. A notice goes up on the land, and from that moment whatever it names has to stop.

It is also the only notice of its kind that can stand on its own. The older stop notice has to have a full enforcement notice sitting behind it. A temporary stop notice does not, which is exactly why councils reach for it when someone starts digging, building or trading over a bank holiday weekend.

The trade-off is that it does not last. In England a temporary stop notice runs for up to 56 days and then it dies, and the council cannot simply issue another one. It is a pause button, not an answer. What the council does with those 56 days is what actually matters to you.

There is also a four year rule buried in this power that catches councils out, and we come to it below, because it is the one thing on this page most likely to be worth money to you.

This page covers England, and flags where Wales differs. It 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 a temporary stop notice actually does

 

The notice names an activity and tells you to stop it. That is the whole of its power. It can stop all of an activity or just the part the council objects to, but it can only ever tell you to stop doing something. It cannot make you do anything.

So a temporary stop notice can halt the building work, the tipping, the car sales or the events. It cannot order you to pull down what you have already built, put the hedge back, or tidy the site. Those need different tools, and if the council wants demolition or removal it has to go on and serve a proper enforcement notice.

The bar for issuing one is lower than most people assume, and lower than a lot of published guidance suggests. The council only has to think that there has been a breach and that it is worth stopping the activity straight away. It does not have to be sure, it does not have to have proved anything, and nobody has to have decided you are in the wrong. Being right about the law is your problem to demonstrate afterwards, not the council’s to establish first.

 

It bites when it goes up, not when it reaches you

 

This is the part that surprises people, and it is worth reading twice.

The council must display a copy of the notice on the land, along with a statement explaining what it means and what happens if you ignore it. The notice takes effect from the moment that copy first goes up. Not when you read it. Not when the post arrives. When it is fixed to the fence.

The council may also serve a copy on you, on whoever is occupying the land, or on anyone it thinks has an interest in it. But that is optional. Displaying it is the compulsory bit, and displaying it is what makes it bite.

The practical result is that you can be bound by a temporary stop notice, and can commit a criminal offence by carrying on, without ever having been handed one. If you own a site you do not visit daily, or you have contractors working while you are away, that is a real risk. There is a defence if you genuinely did not know, but you have to prove it, and we come back to that below.

 

How long it lasts, and why there is usually only one

 

In England a temporary stop notice lasts up to 56 days, counted from the day the copy first goes up. In Wales it is 28 days. The English period was doubled from 28 days to 56 on 25 April 2024, so older articles and older council leaflets still say 28. For England they are out of date.

The notice can specify a shorter period, and the council can withdraw it early. Otherwise it simply expires. There is no renewal and no extension.

More importantly, the council cannot issue a second temporary stop notice about the same activity unless it has taken some other enforcement action in the meantime. That is what stops a council chaining notices together to keep you shut down indefinitely. It has to either escalate or let you carry on.

So when a temporary stop notice lands, the real question is not the notice. It is what the council does in those 56 days. If it issues an enforcement notice, that is the thing you can actually fight. If it does nothing, the activity can lawfully start again the day the notice expires.

 

The four year rule that stops the council using this at all

 

A temporary stop notice cannot prohibit an activity that has been going on for four years or more, counting back from the day the notice is first displayed. The four years do not have to be unbroken.

Any period when the activity had planning permission does not count towards those four years. And the four year protection does not cover everything. It does not protect building, engineering or mining work, anything that goes with that sort of work, or the dumping of refuse and waste. In plain terms it protects uses, not construction and not tipping.

Here is why that matters so much in England. The general deadline for a council to take enforcement action against most breaches is now ten years. But the four year limit on temporary stop notices was left alone when that change was made. It still says four years, in England and in Wales alike.

Put those two together and you get a real gap. An unauthorised use that has been running for, say, six years in England is still very much enforceable, because the council has ten years to act. Yet on the face of the Act it can no longer be stopped by a temporary stop notice, because it has passed the four year mark. The fast tool runs out long before the enforcement power does.

We should be straight with you about the status of that point. It is what the words of the Act say, read plainly, and we have set out the sections below so you can check them yourself. We have not found a commentator who spells it out and we are not aware of it having been tested in court. So treat it as a genuine argument worth putting to your council or your solicitor, not as a settled rule you can rely on without advice.

 

The other things it cannot touch

 

A temporary stop notice cannot stop the use of a building as a dwelling house. Note that it says building. On the face of it that protection does not reach a caravan, and it does not reach land.

The Secretary of State can also set out other activities that are off limits, and this is where a lot of published advice is badly out of date. There used to be a regulation protecting a caravan that was somebody’s main home. It was revoked in England on 4 May 2013. Plenty of websites, and some council pages, still describe that protection as though it existed. In England it does not. Nothing is currently set out in regulations. We have not checked the position in Wales, so do not assume Wales is the same either way.

 

It does not stop the enforcement clock

 

A temporary stop notice does not count as taking enforcement action. That sounds like a technicality and it is not.

The law has a short list of things that count as taking enforcement action, and the temporary stop notice is not on it. So issuing one does not pause the enforcement time limits, and it does not trigger the extra bite at the cherry that a council gets after certain other notices. A council that stops your activity and then does nothing else can still run out of time.

The same is true of a planning contravention notice and a section 330 notice. The council can send you all of them, read your answers, halt your work, and the countdown carries on the whole time.

 

Ignoring a temporary stop notice is a criminal offence

 

Carrying on with an activity a temporary stop notice has prohibited is a crime. So is causing or permitting someone else to do it, which reaches landowners who let contractors carry on.

The fine is unlimited, in the magistrates’ court and in the Crown Court, and it has been since 12 March 2015. Be careful here, because the government’s own model temporary stop notice still prints a maximum of £20,000, and councils copy it. That figure has been wrong for over a decade. Unlike some other planning fines, this one is unlimited in Wales as well as England.

When the court sets the fine it must have particular regard to any money you made, or looked likely to make, out of the breach. Treating the fine as a cost of doing business is precisely what that provision exists to defeat.

You can also be prosecuted more than once on the same notice, for different days. Each day you carry on can be charged separately.

There is one defence, and you have to prove both halves of it: that the notice was never served on you, and that you did not know it existed and could not reasonably have been expected to know. Given that the notice has to be displayed on the land, that is a hard defence to run unless you were genuinely nowhere near the site.

 

You cannot appeal a temporary stop notice

 

There is no appeal to the Planning Inspectorate against a temporary stop notice. None is provided for anywhere in the Act. That puts it in the same small group as the breach of condition notice and the information notices.

Your only route is judicial review in the High Court, which challenges how the council reached its decision rather than whether it was right, runs on very short deadlines, and is expensive. For a notice that expires in 56 days anyway, it is rarely worth it. By the time you got to a hearing the notice would usually be dead.

What you can appeal is whatever comes next. If the council follows up with an enforcement notice, that carries a full right of appeal on several grounds, including the argument that planning permission ought to be granted. That is the fight worth preparing for during the 56 days, and the deadlines there are unforgiving. If you would rather regularise the position than fight, a retrospective planning application is the usual route.

 

Will anyone compensate you?

 

Usually not, and the reason is simple. Compensation for a temporary stop notice is only available in three situations:

• the activity turns out to have been authorised all along, by a planning permission or by one of the development orders that grant permission automatically
• you obtain a certificate of lawfulness confirming the activity was lawful, whether from the council or on appeal
• the council withdraws the notice

Even then there are traps. A permission granted on or after the day the notice went up does not help you, and neither does a withdrawal that only follows such a permission. In other words you cannot regularise the position afterwards and then bill the council for the delay.

If compensation is available it covers loss and damage directly caused by having to stop. But the headline is worth being blunt about: if the activity really was a breach, you get nothing. Compensation exists for the case where the council stopped something that was lawful, or backed down.

 

What a temporary stop notice costs you

 

The council does not charge you for issuing a temporary stop notice, and there is no fee to pay in response to one. There is nothing to apply for and nothing to submit.

The costs land elsewhere. Stopping work on a site costs money in idle plant, idle labour and lost trade, and none of that is recoverable unless one of the compensation situations above applies. If you decide the right answer is to regularise the position by applying for permission, or by applying for a certificate to prove the activity was lawful already, those applications do carry fees. Our planning application fees page sets out how the charges work.

 

Listed buildings have their own version

 

Since 25 April 2024 a council that thinks unauthorised work is being done to a listed building can issue a separate listed building temporary stop notice. It also lasts up to 56 days, it also takes effect when it is displayed on the building, and the council also cannot issue a second one without taking other enforcement action first.

There are differences worth knowing. The test is whether stopping the work is worth doing given the effect on the character of the building, so the reasoning is about heritage rather than planning harm generally. And the four year rule described above does not appear in that power at all.

Take this one seriously. Unauthorised work to a listed building is already a criminal offence in its own right, whether or not any notice is ever issued, and there is no time limit on enforcement. Our page on listed building enforcement covers the notice itself, the eleven appeal grounds and the fines.

 

What to do if one appears on your land

 

Stop. Whatever you think of the merits, the activity has to cease while the notice is live, and carrying on is a criminal offence with an unlimited fine attached. This is not the point to make a stand.

Then use the time. Read what the notice actually prohibits, because it may be narrower than you assume and the rest of your site may be able to carry on. Photograph and date everything, including the notice and the site as it stands. Work out how long the activity has really been going on, because the four year point above may matter. Then get advice quickly, and expect the real decision to be about what the council does next rather than about the notice itself.

It is also worth asking honestly whether the activity has a future. If it plainly needs permission and plainly would not get it, 56 days of enforced pause is a cheap moment to change course, and far cheaper than an enforcement notice, an appeal and a prosecution. Fighting to restart something that will be stopped properly in two months’ time is rarely the right call.

 

If someone has reported you and nothing has landed yet, our page on being reported to planning enforcement explains what the council does next.

Temporary stop notice relevant legislation

The power sits in sections 171E to 171H of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Check the “Changes to Legislation” panel at the top of each page below before relying on the wording, because amendments are sometimes made but not yet written into the text you are reading.

• Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s171E: the power to issue a temporary stop notice, and the rule that it takes effect on display
• Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s171F: the restrictions, including the four year rule and the bar on a second notice
• Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s171G: the offence, the single defence and the unlimited fine
• Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s171H: compensation, and the three situations in which it is available
• Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s171A: what counts as taking enforcement action, which a temporary stop notice does not
• Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, s116: the change from 28 days to 56 days in England, in force 25 April 2024
• Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, s44AA: the separate listed building temporary stop notice

Other Enforcement Sections

 

 

 

Temporary stop notice Page Updated: 4th August 2026