Leeds: cooling planning decisions

Leeds has issued 37 cooling determinations, on applications that say so in their own wording - 30 approvals against 7 refusals. Enough to describe, not enough to be definitive.

Set beside the decided cases are 40 without an outcome at all in Leeds - pending, or withdrawn before an officer ruled.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.

81.1% of the 37 decisions went the applicant's way, across all development types and including 15 householder applications. The refused remainder is large enough to be worth planning around.

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.

The homeowner-specific rate is the one most people want, and Leeds has not yet decided enough domestic applications for it: 15 is under our publication floor, so you get the count and no percentage.

The product's own category barely registers here. 1 of Leeds's decided applications name an air-to-air heat pump, which is the only equipment with a permitted-development route on a house, and that is typical rather than unusual.

Air-source heat pumps track closely alongside. Leeds approved 80.6% of the 31 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 Leeds through the postcode on the application itself. Of the 77 applications recorded for this authority, 98.7% carry a location we could resolve; nationally 1682 of 18427 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.