Planning Permission vs Building Control: What Actually Needs Signing Off Before You Install a Stove

A customer rings up wanting a stove in a 1930s semi with no chimney. Ten minutes into the call they ask if they need planning permission. Then they ask if that's the same thing as "the HETAS thing." It isn't, and mixing the two up is one of the more common ways a job gets delayed at the worst possible moment, usually after the flue is already through the roof.

Here's the actual split: planning permission is about whether the local council needs to approve what you're doing to the building, and building control is about whether the installation itself meets safety and construction standards. Most stove jobs need only the second. Some need both. Almost none need neither.

When planning permission doesn't come into it

For the majority of installations, in a normal residential property that isn't listed and isn't in a conservation area, planning permission simply doesn't apply. Fitting a stove into an existing fireplace opening, or running a new flue up through the house and out through the roof at a standard height, is treated as permitted development. The council doesn't need to know about it.

That covers a big chunk of your work: gas fire conversions, open fireplace replacements, and straightforward twin-wall flue runs through a loft space.

When it does

Planning permission gets triggered by three things in particular, and it's worth having a straight answer ready for each:

A new chimney or flue structure that projects more than one metre above the highest point of the roof will usually need planning consent, because at that height it's considered to materially alter the external appearance of the building. If a customer wants an external chimney breast built up the side of the house rather than an internal flue run, this is the one to flag early, before you've quoted, not after you've booked the job.

Listed buildings need listed building consent regardless of how discreet the flue is. This isn't really about the stove, it's about any alteration to the fabric of the building, and a listed building consultant or the council's conservation officer will want to see how the flue route affects historic fabric. Get this wrong and the homeowner is the one who ends up liable for reinstating the building, not you, but you'll be the one they blame.

Conservation areas and National Parks don't blanket-require permission for every stove, but councils in these areas are often more particular about anything visible from the street, especially external flue terminals. Worth a quick check of the local council's conservation area guidance before you promise a customer a straightforward job.

Everything else, a normal semi, a new-build without heritage constraints, a bungalow with a straightforward vertical flue run, is permitted development on the planning side.

Building control is the one that actually applies to nearly every job

This is where HETAS registration earns its keep. Under the Competent Person Scheme, if you're HETAS registered and the work sits within your recorded categories of competence, you self-certify the installation through HETAS rather than notifying the local authority separately. HETAS then notifies Building Control on your behalf and issues a Certificate of Compliance, usually within about two weeks of the notification going through their Technical Hub.

That certificate isn't paperwork for its own sake. It's what a homeowner's insurer will ask for if there's ever a claim involving the stove or flue, and it's one of the first things a conveyancing solicitor asks for when the house is sold. A missing certificate has stalled more than one house sale, and it's always the installer who gets the annoyed phone call two years later, long after the invoice was paid.

If you're not HETAS registered, or the specific job falls outside what your registration covers, the installation has to be notified to Local Authority Building Control directly, either by you or the homeowner, before work starts. Fees vary by council, but for a job under roughly £2,000 in value you're typically looking at somewhere in the £120 to £200 range, and some councils also want a qualified building control officer to inspect on completion, which can add a bit more on top. It's also slower than self-certification, and it puts the administrative burden back on whoever's arranging it, which in practice is usually the customer chasing you for updates.

Worth being clear with customers on one more point: even where an installer is HETAS registered, existing installations done by someone else, or self-installed stoves, still need retrospective notification to Building Control. HETAS installers can support that process with flue draught tests and visual checks, but they're assisting the Building Control Officer's decision, not simply signing off someone else's work.

Where this actually costs installers money

The expensive version of this isn't the fee, it's the callback. A customer who finds out eighteen months later that their stove was never properly certified is a customer who leaves a bad review, disputes the original invoice, or expects you to sort it out for free because "you're the professional, you should have said." None of that shows up in your diary until it happens.

The fix isn't complicated: capture the certificate reference, the notification date, and which route was used (self-certification vs local authority) against the job the day it's completed, not whenever there's a spare five minutes. That's exactly the kind of thing that gets lost in a WhatsApp thread or a paper folder in the van, and it's the first thing people ask for when something's gone wrong. In BurnerCRM, that detail sits against the job record alongside the HETAS reference and the completion photos, so when a customer calls two years later asking for proof, it's a search, not an excavation of old invoices. Try BurnerCRM if that's currently living in three different places.