Why councils refuse air conditioning applications

This analysis rests on 46 refused applications for which we hold the officer's extracted reasons. That is a small number, and it is a narrower population than "refused applications" - so here it is first, in full, rather than in a footnote.

Of the 11,981 decided cooling and heat-pump applications in the United Kingdom, 721 were refused (6%). We hold the officer's extracted refusal reasons for 46 of the 721 (6.4%).

A further 4 applications carry an extracted reason but were not refused, and they are excluded from every figure on this page. A denominator called refusals has to mean refusals.

The gap between those two numbers is a document-acquisition gap, not a judgement about the rest. A refusal reason exists only where the council's decision document was retrieved and the reasoning extracted, and that retrieval has been running against a different part of the corpus. Refusals are not rare and they are not hidden. We have the paperwork for a slice of them, and we would rather publish the slice with its size attached than wait for a rounder number.

Each ground is ranked by how many of the 46 refused applications with extracted reasons cite it. Those 46 refusals carry 89 tagged reasons between them, so a refusal usually cites more than one ground and a single application can appear under several. The counts below therefore add up to more than the 46 refusals they describe, and no ground's share is the complement of any other's.

**Design and character**, cited in 20 of the 46 (43.5%) refusals with extracted reasons: the unit is judged to harm the appearance of the building or the character of the street, usually because it sits on an elevation in public view rather than out of sight.

**Residential amenity**, cited in 13 of the 46 (28.3%) refusals with extracted reasons: the unit is judged to harm a neighbour's living conditions, most often through disturbance from plant running close to a window or a boundary.

**Noise**, cited in 13 of the 46 (28.3%) refusals with extracted reasons: noise from the outdoor unit is cited as the harm in its own right, rather than as one strand of a wider amenity case.

**Heritage**, cited in 10 of the 46 (21.7%) refusals with extracted reasons: the unit is judged to harm a conservation area or the setting of a listed building, which is the ground most likely to turn on where the unit goes rather than on whether it goes in at all.

A further 8 grounds account for 23 citations across those same 46 refusals between them, each appearing fewer than 10 times. We count them and do not name them.

Read together, the published grounds ask one question from several directions: where does the outdoor unit go. Appearance asks which elevation it sits on. Amenity and noise ask how close it sits to somebody else's window and what it does once it is running. Heritage asks what it is fixed to and what can be seen from the street.

Almost none of them asks whether a home may be cooled at all. That is the practical shape of this dataset: these read as refusals of a position rather than of a principle, which is a different answer from the "the council will never allow it" you get on the forums.

The same concerns turn up far more often as requirements than as rejections. Noise in particular is attached as a condition on approvals at several times its frequency across planning generally, which is the finding on the noise-conditions page.

Since 29 May 2025 an air-to-air heat pump, which heats as well as cools, can be permitted development on a house within size, siting and noise limits, while a cooling-only unit does not get that route and needs a full planning application whatever the property. The refusals in this dataset are therefore drawn from applications that had to be made, and cooling-only schemes are structurally over-represented among them.

Flats sit outside the house route in either case, and leasehold consent is a separate question from planning that a permission does not answer. These are indicative figures drawn from decided applications, not a statement by any council and not legal advice - confirm your own position with your Local Planning Authority before you install.

**46 refused applications with extracted reasons is a small sample, and it behaves like one.** A ground separated from the next by two or three applications is not meaningfully ahead of it. Treat the ordering as indicative and the presence of a ground on the list as the finding.

**No per-council breakdown at this coverage.** We do not publish refusal grounds for individual councils from this sample, and the reason is not only statistical. A refusal ground attached to a handful of applications in one authority can identify a specific household, so the sample floors that govern our published rates govern the refusal breakdowns too, and nobody gets to relax them later as merely editorial. It is the same reason the grounds appearing fewer than 10 times are counted above but not named.

**Grounds are classified officer wording, not verbatim reasons.** Each ground is a topic assigned to the reasoning in a decision notice. The officer's actual words carry qualifications a topic label cannot.

**A refusal is not the end of an application.** This dataset records decisions, not what happened next. Resubmissions, appeals and approvals of a relocated unit sit outside it entirely, so nothing here should be read as the final outcome for those homes.

**It is a keyword match, not a register.** Applications enter the cooling slice when the applicant's own description mentions cooling or heat-pump plant, and the term list is tuned for precision over recall. Read every count as "applications we can identify as cooling plant", never as "all cooling applications in the United Kingdom".

**Counts are a floor, not a total.** The corpus is being backfilled authority by authority in alphabetical order and has not reached every council, so a low count can mean a thin backfill rather than thin demand. 287 English local planning authorities hold at least one application in the slice today, and that number rises as the backfill runs.

**Some applications sit outside every per-council figure.** 1,682 of the 18,427 (9.1%) applications in the slice carry no postcode that resolves to a district, so they are counted nationally and excluded locally rather than quietly assigned to a neighbour.

**"Decided" means decided.** Only applications with an outcome of approved, approved with conditions and refused are counted. Withdrawn and undetermined applications are left out entirely, on either side of every proportion on this page.

A national pattern is the wrong unit for a decision about one house. We publish a cooling planning report for each of the 75 English local planning authorities holding at least 20 decided applications in the slice, and no report at all for the ones that do not - the bar is published rather than quietly met. Start at the council reports.

The planning hub covers the England-wide position and links to a planning page for every area we cover, each with its own local figures and its own sample sizes. The companion analysis to this page is how often councils attach noise conditions.