£613 all-in. £349 refunded if the council refuses.

Every route below includes the same £264 statutory council fee, it's set nationally, not by the service provider. The gap is in the drafting fee.

• Pre-validation against every GPDO Part 1 clause, the same rules the council's planning officer will check. If your project can't win, we tell you before you pay.
• The drafted 1APP form, site location plan, block plan, existing + proposed elevations, floor plans, roof plans, all to the scales councils expect (1:1250 / 1:500 / 1:100 / 1:50).
• Statement of Truth written to the structural standard Inspectors look for.
• Planning Portal submission, fee payment on your behalf, 8 week case monitoring.
• Any response to the council's case officer during the 8 weeks, see Chapter IV for the mechanism.
• Direct dashboard link to share with your conveyancer so they can track the application without pinging you.
• The £349 refund if the council refuses. (The £264 council filing fee is paid to the council at submission and isn't recoverable.)

The fee is statutory, set nationally, not by the individual council, and it's exactly 50% of the full householder planning application fee. It went up to £264 on 1 April 2025 and is indexed to CPI annually. Every council in England charges the same amount.

We pass it through at cost as a separate Stripe line item so refund mechanics are clean: if the council refuses, we refund our £349 service fee. The £264 is paid to the council at the time of filing, the council keeps it regardless of decision, so it's not recoverable from us.

The council's case officer sometimes asks for a clarification during the 8 week window, "was this dormer in place before 2021?", "can you confirm the eaves to boundary distance?", "we need a revised block plan at 1:500". That's part of the £349.

The mechanism is straightforward: we list LDC Express as the agent on your 1APP form (you're the applicant). Councils route all correspondence to the agent by default, so these queries land with us rather than you. The Planning Portal dashboard also shows case updates against the agent account.

When a clarification arrives, we draft the response within one working day using your original intake answers and site photos. If we need information we don't already have, we ask you via your dashboard. No extra fee, even if it takes three rounds to settle.

No per hour top-up. No "complexity" surcharge. No "Article 4 was actually in force" add-on, if Article 4 applies, we tell you at the intake stage and you don't pay.

If the council refuses because of a drafting error on our side (wrong drawing scale, missing document type, mis-cited clause), we don't make you pay again. We re-draft and re-file at no additional service-fee charge. Most councils waive the re-submission fee under Regulation 9 of the 2012 Fees Regulations ("free-go"); where a council doesn't honour free-go on the re-submission, we cover the £264 ourselves. One re-file per case. Details in the Terms.

The only thing that ever increases your total is if you decide to apply for two genuinely different certificates on the same property (e.g. A rear extension on one application, a garden office on another). Each certificate is its own £613 because each is filed with the council as a separate application.