Overlooking and loss of privacy: how to object to a planning application

What counts as overlooking in planning terms, the window-to-window distances councils use, and how to write a privacy objection that a planning officer will weigh.

What overlooking means to a planning officer

Overlooking is a direct view from a new window, door, balcony, roof terrace or raised deck into a habitable room or the private part of a neighbouring garden. Privacy is a material consideration in every local plan's residential amenity policy. What is not a material consideration is being able to see a neighbour's roof, or a general sense of being closer together.

The distances councils use

Many councils' design guides set a minimum distance between directly facing habitable room windows, commonly around 21 metres between rear windows across gardens and around 12 metres from a window to a blank wall. These are guides, not rules, and they are relaxed in dense urban areas and tightened where levels differ. A side window at a short distance from a boundary, a first-floor window looking down into a garden, or a balcony are the situations most likely to be found harmful.

Building the ground

• Identify the exact opening on the proposed elevations: "the first-floor window on the north elevation".
• Say what it looks into: your rear garden, the patio immediately outside your living room, your bedroom window.
• Give the distance and any difference in ground level.
• Say whether the view exists today. New overlooking that did not exist before is what carries weight.
• Cite the local plan amenity policy and, in England, the national policy on living conditions.
• Ask for the remedy: obscure glazing fixed shut below 1.7 metres, deletion of the window, a screen to a balcony, or refusal if the harm cannot be conditioned away.

The condition that usually solves it

Where the offending window serves a bathroom, stair or landing, councils routinely impose an obscure glazing condition rather than refuse. Asking for that condition explicitly, with the glazing level and the opening restriction, gives the officer a ready-made answer and is often the practical win. Where the window serves a bedroom or living room, obscure glazing is less acceptable to the applicant and the case for refusal or redesign is stronger.

Curtilage writes this ground from what you tell it about the window and the distance, cites the policy that applies in your council, and phrases the condition request in the form officers use.

Updated 2026-09-14. Curtilage is not legal advice.