Terms of service

Plain-English summary first, formal terms below. If anything is unclear, email hello@ldcexpress.co.uk before you buy.

Plain-English summary

• We prepare and file Lawful Development Certificate applications for householders in England. We are not a law firm. We don't give legal advice.
• You pay our £349 service fee and the council's statutory fee at checkout, as two separate line items. The council fee depends on the project. For an extension or loft conversion it is £274 for a proposed-works certificate (Section 192) or £548 for a retrospective one (Section 191). For an outbuilding within the curtilage, such as a garden office or garage, it is £136 and £272 respectively. If you pick the Express tier, an extra £100 is charged on top for same-working-day drafting and filing.
• If the council refuses your certificate, or the application is invalidated for a reason that isn't your fault, we refund our service fee in full — £349 on Standard, £449 on Express. The council fee is paid to the council at submission and is not recoverable from us — the council keeps it regardless of decision.
• Filing tells the council the work exists. Indemnity insurance policies normally require that the council has never been approached, so after we file — and especially after a refusal — indemnity is usually no longer available to you. Our refund covers our fee, not that. Section 5b.
• We don't mark the council fee up; we pass it through at cost. It's set by regulation and goes up each 1 April. The figure shown at checkout is the one charged.
• You have a 14-day right to cancel. Because you ask us to start straight away, you lose that right for the drafting work once it has begun, and the council fee can't be recovered once paid. Details in section 4.
• We can't refund if you gave us materially inaccurate information at intake — e.g. undisclosed listed status, Article 4, or existing enforcement action — or didn't supply information we asked for.
• You own the documents we produce. You can use them elsewhere if you want.

1. Service scope

LDC Express prepares and files Section 191 and Section 192 Lawful Development Certificate applications with English local planning authorities. We cover all English councils, for householder properties under GPDO Schedule 2 Part 1 Classes A, B, and E only.

For each case we draft the Statement of Truth, complete the application form, write the cover letter, and file the application by email with the council's planning team, paying the council fee on your behalf. We act as your named agent for correspondence with the council. You supply the site photographs and an OS-licensed site location plan with the property outlined in red (we tell you where to buy one, typically £10, and check it before filing). We do not produce architectural drawings, elevations, or floor plans, and we do not file through the Planning Portal.

2. Not legal advice

LDC Express is not a law firm, not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and does not provide legal advice. Information on this site and communications through the service are provided for general information only. If you need legal advice on a sale, purchase, dispute, enforcement action, or planning-consultant-level advocacy on a complex case, you should consult a qualified solicitor or chartered planner.

3. Pricing and payment

Our Standard service fee is £349. The council fee depends on the type of certificate:

Council fees are set by regulation (the Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) Regulations 2012, as amended) and indexed each 1 April. The figures above are the rates from 1 April 2026. The figure shown at checkout is the one charged. Both amounts are charged at checkout via Stripe as separate line items. Your bank will see two adjacent transactions or one itemised receipt depending on your card issuer.

VAT: {{VAT_STATUS}}. Any VAT due on our service fee is shown at checkout before you pay. The council fee is outside the scope of VAT.

If you choose the Express tier at checkout, an additional £100 service premium is charged in the same Stripe session. Express buys priority drafting (your case goes to the front of the drafting queue, ahead of Standard cases) and priority filing (we submit to the council within one working day of you approving the drafts). We aim to have Express drafts ready the same working day payment clears, and we will always have them ready within one working day. The Express premium is subject to the same refund guarantee as the Standard service fee — if the council refuses, we refund the full £449 service amount (Standard £349 + Express £100).

4. Your right to cancel

Under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 you have the right to cancel this contract within 14 days of the day you pay, without giving a reason.

We start work immediately at your express request. At checkout you tick a box asking us to begin within the 14-day period and acknowledging the consequences below. Because of that:

• If you cancel after we have started drafting but before we file, you pay for the work done up to the point of cancellation, in proportion to the full service fee. Once the drafts have been delivered to your dashboard, the drafting service has been fully performed and you lose the right to cancel in respect of it.
• The council fee is paid to the council when we file. Once paid it cannot be recovered by us or by you, whether or not you later cancel.
• If you cancel before we have started drafting, we refund everything you paid, including the council fee, within 14 days.

How to cancel. Email hello@ldcexpress.co.uk from the address you used at checkout, quoting your case reference and saying that you want to cancel. You can use the form below but you don't have to. Your cancellation takes effect from the moment you send it.

Model cancellation form

To LDC Express ({{ENTITY_NAME}}), {{REGISTERED_ADDRESS}}, hello@ldcexpress.co.uk:
I hereby give notice that I cancel my contract for the supply of the following service: Lawful Development Certificate preparation and filing, case reference [your reference].
Ordered on [date].
Name of consumer: [name].
Address of consumer: [address].
Signature of consumer (only if this form is sent on paper): [signature].
Date: [date].

5. Refund guarantee

We will refund the full service amount you paid us within 14 working days — £349 on Standard, £449 on Express (Standard + £100 premium) — if either:

• the local planning authority refuses your certificate; or
• the application is invalidated or withdrawn by us for any reason other than your misrepresentation or your failure to supply information we or the council requested.

A council that has not decided within the statutory eight weeks has not refused your application, and delay is not a ground for a refund. The law lets you appeal to the Planning Inspectorate for non-determination as if the application had been refused, but that is not a refusal for the purposes of this guarantee. If the council has not decided by then, we chase it and keep you informed.

The council's statutory fee is paid by us to the council on your behalf at the time of submission. The council retains this fee whether they approve or refuse your application, as a matter of statute, and we have no ability to recover it. This exclusion from the refund is disclosed on our homepage, pricing page, checkout, and in this agreement.

The refund guarantee does not apply where:

• You materially misrepresented information at the intake stage (undisclosed listed status, Article 4 direction, existing enforcement action, material inaccuracies in measurements).
• You did not respond to requests from us or the case officer within 10 working days, or did not supply a document we asked for (for example the site location plan, photographs, or a statutory declaration we asked for), and the application was refused or invalidated as a result. (Where this applies, section 5c still gives you one free re-file.)
• You changed the project materially after we filed and the refusal relates to the changed project.

The council fee is non-refundable once paid to the council — we pass this through at cost and cannot reclaim it.

5b. Indemnity insurance and what filing does

Filing an application puts the development on the local planning authority's record. Planning indemnity insurance policies ordinarily require that the local planning authority has never been approached about the development. Once we file on your behalf, that condition is broken, and indemnity insurance will normally no longer be available to you for that development — whether the authority grants your certificate or refuses it.

This means a refusal can leave you without the certificate, without the council fee, and without the indemnity option you may have had before you instructed us. We disclose this on the payment step of the intake form, and you confirm you have understood it by ticking a box before payment. We also decline cases where, on the answers you give at intake, filing would in our view leave you worse off than not filing — in particular a Section 191 application that rests on the enforcement time limits rather than on the development having been permitted development, where a sale is in progress and indemnity insurance is still available to you.

Our refund guarantee covers our service fee. It does not extend to the council fee, to the cost or availability of indemnity insurance, to the value of an indemnity policy you can no longer obtain, or to any loss arising from a delayed or failed property transaction. Our liability remains limited as set out in section 8.

5a. Drafting-error re-file

If the council's decision notice cites a defect in our drafting as a reason for refusal — e.g. a missing required document, a mis-cited GPDO clause, an imprecise description of the development — we will, at no additional service-fee charge to you, re-draft and re-file the application with the defect corrected, and we pay the fresh council fee ourselves so you are not charged twice.

This is limited to one re-file per case and applies only where the refusal reason is a drafting defect in our work, not where the refusal is on fact-and-degree grounds, council judgement, or an error in the information or documents you supplied. We determine at our discretion whether a refusal qualifies; our assessment is based on the council's written decision notice.

5c. If a deadline is missed: one free re-file

If your application is refused, invalidated or left undetermined because a request from the council or from us wasn't answered in time, we will prepare and submit the application again without charging our service fee a second time. Our drafting work is already done and we will redo it for you.

This applies once per case, within 12 months of the date you first instructed us. We limit it to 12 months for two reasons. Evidence supporting a certificate becomes harder to rely on over time. And the enforcement immunity rules changed on 25 April 2024, so a case that would have succeeded on the four-year rule can stop being arguable during a long delay. After 12 months we will assess your situation again as new work.

The new council fee is payable by you, unless the council refunded the old one. Where an application is decided — granted or refused — the council keeps its statutory fee, so a fresh submission requires a fresh fee and the council does not credit what you have already paid. Where an application is instead rejected as invalid, regulation 11(12) of the Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) Regulations 2012 requires the council to refund the fee. Those are different outcomes and we treat them differently. Where the council refunds the fee, that refund is yours, and we set it against the fee for the resubmission rather than returning it and asking you for the same money back. If the fee has risen in the meantime you pay only the difference; if it has not, there is nothing further to pay. Where the council keeps the fee, the resubmission needs a new one. Either way we pass the fee through at cost and charge nothing on top of it.

The fee charged is the rate in force on the day we resubmit, which may be higher than you originally paid. Statutory planning fees are set by the Government, indexed annually on 1 April, and changed from time to time by regulations — the next such change takes effect on 8 December 2026. If the rate has risen between your first application and the resubmission, the amount payable is the new rate, and we have no discretion to charge the old one. We will tell you the exact amount in writing before you pay anything, and by asking us to resubmit you agree to pay the rate then in force.

We will not resubmit until that fee is paid. You do not have to proceed. If you do nothing, we charge you nothing further and file nothing.

Except where the missed deadline was ours. We are named as your agent, so the council writes to us, and passing its requests on to you is our responsibility. If we have no record of having done so, we pay the new council fee ourselves.

This is separate from the refund guarantee in section 5. Where that guarantee does not apply because a request went unanswered, this section still applies: you do not get our fee back, but we do the work again.

6. Your obligations

You agree to provide accurate information about the property and the proposed or existing development, to respond to information requests within 10 working days, to supply the site photographs and an OS-licensed site location plan we ask for before filing, and not to start works (for s.192) or make material changes to completed works (for s.191) during the application. Where your council requires it, or asks for it during the application, you also agree to make your statement as a statutory declaration in front of a solicitor or commissioner for oaths and upload the witnessed copy; the witness's fee (£5, plus £2 for each document attached to it) is yours to pay.

7. Data and confidentiality

We handle personal data under UK GDPR as set out in our Privacy Policy. Application documents become public once filed (planning applications are a public register).

8. Limitation of liability

Our liability to you in connection with the service is limited to the service amount you paid us (£349 Standard or £449 Express), except in cases of fraud or death/personal injury caused by our negligence, for which UK law does not permit us to exclude liability. Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

9. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Disputes will be heard in the English courts.

10. Changes

We may update these terms from time to time. Material changes will be notified by email to customers with active applications.

Last updated: 2026-09-03.