Woking: 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 Woking whatever the property, because on its own it only cools.

So the system you choose changes your planning path in Woking, not just your comfort. The same box that both heats and cools opens the permitted-development route on a house; a unit that only cools does not. Woking carries genuinely low conservation-area coverage (about 4% 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 Woking flat will usually need both freeholder or managing-agent consent and planning permission.

Conservation-area coverage is genuinely low in Woking, at around 4.1% 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 Woking Council's planning permission.

Woking has decided 11 planning applications mentioning air conditioning or other cooling plant, 9 approved and 2 refused, 6 of them householder applications. That is enough to report the counts and not enough to publish an approval rate from.

The match is on the wording of each application, so this counts applications that mention cooling equipment rather than every cooling installation Woking has seen.

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 Woking property types we profile average roughly 50 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 is a dealbreaker: councils in Woking approve outdoor units for homes like these all the time. Around 4.1% of local properties sit inside a conservation area, so it is a step to plan for rather than a formality. Being close to a listed building - around 0.8% of homes here sit within 30 metres of one is not the same as your home being listed, and public data can flag conservation status without settling it. This is indicative guidance, not legal advice: confirm the final position with your Local Planning Authority before you install.