Crawley: air conditioning planning permission

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 cooling-only air conditioning unit does not get that route and needs a full planning application in Crawley whatever the property, because on its own it only cools.

In Crawley, the system you choose is a planning decision as much as a comfort one. An air-to-air heat pump on a house qualifies for permitted development because it does both jobs; a unit that only cools is excluded from that route entirely. Crawley carries genuinely low conservation-area coverage (about 3% of EPC-certified homes), which makes an external unit a lower-friction proposition here than in a heritage-dense borough for most addresses - a real advantage, not a workaround.

Flats are the sharpest exception here as everywhere in England: the permitted-development right for an outdoor unit sits with the house, not the flat, so a Crawley flat will usually need both freeholder or managing-agent consent and planning permission.

Conservation-area coverage is genuinely low in Crawley, at around 3.4% of properties - one of the lower figures we track. Most houses can therefore fit an outdoor unit under permitted development without a fresh application; flats are still the exception and will usually need Crawley Council's planning permission.

The record for Crawley is too thin to publish from. A few decided applications is not a basis for an approval rate, and hedging one into vagueness would be worse than leaving it out.

What actually gets refused, and what councils attach when they approve, is a national picture rather than a local one at the volume of officer reasoning currently published. We set both out with their sample sizes: why cooling applications get refused and the conditions councils attach.

You can also compare what each council decides, where enough decisions exist to publish a figure.

The Crawley property types we profile average roughly 51 dB of daytime background noise, and a unit is judged against that baseline rather than in the abstract.

So siting decides more than the equipment does. Moving the outdoor unit away from a neighbour's window and off the boundary line is the single change that most often rescues a borderline application.

None of this should put you off. Councils across Crawley approve outdoor units for homes exactly like this all the time. Roughly 3.4% of properties sit inside a conservation area, and it is still a genuine step rather than a rubber stamp. Being near a listed building - around 0.4% of homes here sit within 30 metres of one is not the same as being listed yourself, and public records can raise a conservation-area flag without resolving it. This stays indicative, not legal advice: confirm with your Local Planning Authority before you install.