Cooling planning decisions by council

Since a 2025 rule change, the only equipment that can be permitted development on a house is an air-to-air heat pump, which heats as well as cools. A unit that only cools has no such route anywhere in England and needs a full application every time, which makes your council the decision rather than a formality on the way to one.

Each report below sets out what one local planning authority has actually decided on applications mentioning cooling equipment: how many, how many were approved, how many refused, what it attaches to an approval where we can see it, and what the data cannot tell you. The figures come from the statutory planning registers, not from a survey or an estimate.

A report is published for a council only where we hold at least 20 decided applications mentioning cooling equipment for it. 75 English authorities currently clear that bar. Below it there is no page, because a rate drawn from a handful of decisions would look authoritative and would not be.

That is why some large authorities are missing. Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bristol, City of, Nottingham have no report yet - not because nothing is happening there, but because our historical record does not yet reach far enough back into those authorities to publish a defensible figure. The record is being extended authority by authority, and this list grows as it advances.

Nationally the slice holds 14105 English applications mentioning cooling equipment. Of 18427 applications across the UK slice, 1682 could not be tied to a district from the postcode on the application, which is 9.1%, and every one of them is excluded from the figures on this site rather than assigned to a council it might not belong to.

Every authority clearing the sample-size bar has a published report.

If your council is missing, the area guides cover the planning position for the major cities and boroughs regardless, using property and heritage data rather than decision counts.

Every headline rate on these pages covers all development types, and each one states its sample size and its householder count in the same sentence as the percentage. That is deliberate. Commercial and mixed-use schemes make up a large share of any council's cooling caseload, so an all-development approval rate is a weaker guide to a domestic application than its size suggests, and separating the two is the difference between evidence and a comforting number.

A householder-only rate appears only where that subset independently clears the same sample-size bar. Where it does not, the count is still disclosed so you can see the denominator you are working with, and the rate is withheld rather than estimated.

Counts are floors. Applications are identified from their own descriptions, so an installation described as external plant is missing from them, and for a few authorities our record does not reach far back, which each page says on its face.