Cambridge: cooling planning decisions

110 approvals and 4 refusals make up the 114 cooling determinations Cambridge has issued, counting applications that say so in their own wording.

Set beside the decided cases are 63 without an outcome at all in Cambridge - pending, or withdrawn before an officer ruled. Keeping those out of the denominator is deliberate: an abandoned application tells you nothing about what the council would have said.

That is 96.5% approved across 114 decisions covering every development type, 28 of them householder applications. Approval is clearly the norm, with enough refusals in the record that the detail of a submission still carries weight.

The scope matters as much as the number. Commercial and mixed-use plant makes up a large share of any council's cooling caseload, so an all-development rate is a weaker guide to a domestic application than its size suggests.

Narrowed to homes, the picture is 96.4% - 27 approvals out of 28 householder decisions. This is the number to weigh if you are a homeowner, and it is here only because the sample supports it.

No decided application in Cambridge names an air-to-air heat pump, the one category that both heats and cools. Do not read that as the council disliking them - read it as a case officer who has probably not seen one, which is a different problem and a solvable one.

Air-source heat pumps track closely alongside. Cambridge approved 96.3% of the 163 applications mentioning one, within a point or two of its cooling-plant record above.

These two figures are never added, averaged or read as one. Most air-source schemes heat rather than cool, and an application mentioning both sits in both counts.

The distinction is the whole point: an air-to-air heat pump, which heats as well as cools, can be permitted development on a house, and a cooling-only unit cannot.

Since 2025-05-29, England's permitted-development rules let a house fit an air-to-air heat pump, which heats as well as cools, without a planning application in many cases, within set size, siting and noise limits. A unit that only cools has no equivalent route and needs a full application whatever the property.

That is why the decisions above matter more than they would have before the change. Every cooling-only installation now crosses a planning officer's desk, so the council's posture is not background information, it is the decision.

Flats are the sharpest exception, here as everywhere in England: the permitted-development right for an outdoor unit belongs to the house rather than to a flat within it, so a flat will usually need freeholder or managing-agent consent as well as planning permission.

What those refusals were FOR is a national question at the volume of officer reasoning currently published, not a council-level one, and we do not pretend otherwise. Both findings are set out with their sample sizes: why cooling applications get refused and the conditions councils attach to an approval.

Every council we can publish a figure for is listed on the council index.

Applications are identified from their own description, so every count on these pages means applications mentioning cooling equipment, not every cooling installation in the area. An application that fitted the same kit but described it as external plant is not in these figures, which makes them a floor on activity rather than a census.

Each application is assigned to Cambridge through the postcode on the application itself. Of the 177 applications recorded for this authority, 100% carry a location we could resolve; nationally 1738 of 19260 applications could not be tied to a district at all and sit outside every figure on this site rather than being quietly assigned somewhere.

What this page cannot tell you is what will happen at your address. It has no view of your elevation, your neighbours' windows, whether your home sits in a conservation area, or whether it is a listed building - and a neighbour's approval settles none of those. This is indicative guidance drawn from public planning records, not legal advice: confirm the final position with your Local Planning Authority before you install.