From 31 October, officers must decide every Reigate & Banstead application under 10 homes, whatever the objections. The committee also drops to 13 members.

From 31 October, asking your councillor to take a small planning application to committee will no longer work in Reigate and Banstead. A council officer will have to decide it, whatever the objections say and whoever calls it in.

The change comes from the Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026, made on 15 July and in force on 31 October. They apply to every local planning authority in England.

Reigate and Banstead’s planning officers set out the local effect in a report to the Planning Committee on 9 September. It says the reforms “require a maximum Committee size of 13 Members” and a national scheme of delegation, “meaning all minor applications (below 10 dwellings) must be determined by Officers regardless of call-in or objection”.

Changes to the council’s constitution go to Full Council on 1 October, so that applications “can continue to be decided lawfully from 31st October onwards”.

What officers must now decide alone

Chart comparing what a planning officer must decide alone from 31 October 2026 with what may still be referred to the Planning Committee, under the Town and Country Planning Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions England Regulations 2026

Schedule 1 of the regulations lists the applications that must go to an officer. In plain terms, that covers most of what a resident actually encounters:

  • householder applications, meaning extensions, loft conversions, outbuildings and the like
  • minor residential applications: one to nine dwellings on a site under 0.5 hectares
  • minor commercial applications
  • certificates of lawfulness, existing or proposed
  • applications for permission in principle
  • non-material amendments to an existing permission
  • applications to vary or remove conditions on a permission that was itself in this list

Regulation 4 is short and leaves no discretion. The authority “must make arrangements so that any Schedule 1 application made to that authority is determined by an officer of that authority”. Regulation 2(2) goes further: the council must not make arrangements that limit the officer’s discretion over how to decide it.

The council’s Q1 figures give a sense of the scale. Reigate and Banstead received 263 planning applications in the first quarter of 2026/27, of which 153 were householder applications. That is 58% of the intake in the single largest Schedule 1 category, before minor residential and minor commercial are added.

What can still reach councillors

Schedule 2 covers the bigger and more sensitive work: listed building consent, applications that are not householder, minor commercial or minor residential, advertisement consents, tree preservation order consents, retrospective applications under section 73A, and reserved matters on outline permissions for 500 or more homes.

Even these do not go to committee automatically. Under regulation 5, a Schedule 2 application only goes to members if a nominated member and a nominated officer agree to refer it, and they may do so only where in their view it raises:

  • one or more issues of economic, social or environmental significance to the local area, or
  • one or more significant planning matters, having regard to the development plan and other material considerations

Anything not referred must be delegated to an officer. Applications by the council itself, or by its members or officers, or where the council has an interest, are handled separately under regulation 6, and those too are delegated unless the nominated member and officer agree to refer them.

The committee has to get smaller

Regulation 7 caps any committee deciding these applications at 13 members.

Reigate and Banstead’s Planning Committee currently has 15, as listed on the agenda for the 9 September meeting: Councillors Parnall (Chair), Blacker (Vice-Chair), Baker, Chandler, Gabriel, Harp, Hudson, Kulka, McKenna, Michalowski, Orchard, Snuggs, Thorne, Torra and Walsh. Two seats have to go. That is part of what the 1 October constitution report has to settle.

The minutes of the same meeting record that members “expressed concerns regarding the implications of national planning reforms and the perceived reduction in local decision-making influence”, and that they highlighted “the importance of maintaining effective local representation in planning matters”.

The Secretary of State must review the regulations and publish the conclusions by 31 October 2028.

What it means for you

If a neighbour applies to extend, this is the practical change. Until 31 October you can object, and a ward councillor can ask for the application to be called in so that the committee hears it in public. From 31 October, on anything under ten homes, that route closes. Your objection still has to be considered by the case officer, and it still has to be a planning objection to carry weight, but there will be no public meeting and no vote.

Two things follow from that.

Your written objection matters more, not less. It is now the whole of your input. Our guide to Reigate planning applications sets out what the council can and cannot take into account, and how to submit comments through the register.

The consultation deadline is the real deadline. There is no committee date to aim at afterwards. Check the neighbour consultation expiry on the application’s page in the register and work back from it.

Appeals are unaffected. An applicant refused by an officer keeps the same right of appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. On the council’s Q1 record, that is not a soft route: twelve non-major appeals were decided in the quarter and all twelve were dismissed, which officers themselves describe as “unusual and more likely to be a coincidence than a trend”.

Two other national changes landed over the summer and are already in play here. Biodiversity net gain rules changed on 6 August, exempting applications below 0.2 hectares and removing the self-build exemption. A revised National Planning Policy Framework was published on 17 August.

We keep a running page of Reigate planning news as decisions come through, including the 299-home Kingswood approval taken at the same 9 September meeting.

Sources

More from Reigate News: planning applications, planning news and council tax bands.