 Thinking of doing work to your home. Here are our planners' top tips for getting your planning application right first time. Do you know the difference between permitted development, planning permission, listed building consent or a tree works order? Depending on what you plan to do and what kind of building you own, you might need a different kind of application, or more than one. The rules are set by national government. If you submit the wrong type of application, we can't assess it, and we have to ask you to go back and start again. Most people use an architect, a surveyor, a planning consultant or another building professional to act as their agent. These people know what kinds of permission you will need and can get all the right documents together so the process goes smoothly. We need drawings that are to scale and fairly detailed. They need to show all of the features of your property accurately. Most people get a surveyor to do a measured survey so that they know exactly how much space they have to work with. Some people don't send in all the drawings we need. We don't just need a floor plan. We need drawings of the external elevations and drawings that show the relationship to the other buildings and features around the site. Think about trees. If your proposal affects any trees, you might need a specialist tree report to ensure that it won't cause any damage. If your property is a listed building, we need a heritage impact assessment to show that you won't damage any important historic features. We have checklists to tell you what to submit. Until we have all the information we need, we can't start assessing your application. If you use an agent to help you, we can work with them to iron out as many potential problems as we can beforehand. You can follow the progress of your application on our website and we have lots more advice there too.