How likely is my planning application to get approved in Bexley?

Bexley approves plenty of planning applications every year. But whether yours is likely to be one of them? That's a different question entirely — and the answer depends on details about your specific property that most homeowners never think to check. WhatCanIBuild can show you what's actually been approved and refused near you, so you're not going in blind.

Where your property sits changes everything

Bexley isn't a uniform borough. The south and east have areas within the Green Belt, where the rules around what you can build — and what needs permission in the first place — are significantly more restricted. But it's not just Green Belt. Conservation areas, Article 4 directions, and flood zones exist across the borough too, and they each affect your application differently.

Most homeowners don't realise that two properties on the same street can have completely different planning constraints. One might sail through. The other gets refused for reasons that never came up in any initial research. The constraint that matters isn't the one you know about — it's the one you didn't check.

It's not just about whether you need permission

Even if your project clearly needs a planning application, the question of whether it'll be approved is separate — and harder to answer. Bexley Council planners weigh up a range of factors: the character of the area, what's been approved or refused on neighbouring properties, design and scale, and how your proposal interacts with whatever constraints sit on your land.

That last part is where it gets complicated. Being in a conservation area, for example, doesn't automatically mean refusal. But it does mean your application will be judged against a different set of expectations — and what those expectations mean for your specific project, on your specific plot, isn't something you can easily look up.

What similar projects nearby actually got

Here's what most homeowners don't have access to when they start planning a project: the actual decision history for similar applications nearby. Not just whether a neighbour extended — but what they applied for, how the council responded, and what reasoning was given when something was refused.

That decision history is the closest thing to a real approval signal you can get. It tells you whether the council has been approving side returns on your road, or whether rear extensions above a certain scale keep getting knocked back. It tells you whether there's a pattern — and whether your project fits it or fights it.

The best way to understand what that history means for your specific property is to use WhatCanIBuild, which pulls together nearby decisions and surfaces the approval odds for your project type in your area — not just generic borough-wide guidance.

So how likely is your application to succeed?

Honestly? It depends on your property. The borough-level picture only gets you so far. What matters is the combination of constraints on your specific address, the precedent set by nearby decisions, and how your project sits against Bexley's local expectations.

WhatCanIBuild gives you a property-level view of all of this — what's been approved and refused near you, what constraints apply to your address, and what your approval odds actually look like before you spend £258 on a fee and eight weeks waiting for an answer.