Listing Services
Our listing services can help you de-risk your site and provide certainty early in the development of your design.
Listing services
If your site includes historic buildings or structures, Historic England's range of listing services can help you de-risk your site and provide certainty early in the development of your design.
We can:
- Screen a site for heritage assets and potential listed buildings or structures
- Reassess a building to provide an enhanced list description
- Fast-track an application for listing
- Consider a building for a Certificate of Immunity from Listing
Through our paid-for Enhanced Advisory Services, we guarantee to send our advice and recommendations to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) for its final decision within an agreed timescale (usually within 12 weeks). This means your plans for development can be timetabled with more confidence. Please note, however, that this does not include the time taken by DCMS to make a decision.
The Enhanced Advisory Service Description document provides a full description of our listing services.
Listing Enhancement
An enhanced list description will set out clearly and in detail why a building has been listed and where its significance lies.
Listing extends to the whole of the property, internally and externally, including extensions and other structures.
Enhanced list descriptions can indicate where the significance lies and even, in some cases, explicitly identify and exclude less significant parts of the building or structure. This helps you to have certainty over where the special interest lies and helps inform heritage consultants and conservation officers in their assessment of what adaptations, alterations, and changes a building can accommodate.
This does not remove the need for Listed Building Consent, where relevant, but does give Local Planning Authorities the detail they need to make quicker, better-informed and more appropriate decisions.
Certificate of Immunity from Listing
If you are unsure if a building or structure is eligible for listing, it may delay your planning application and affect the nature of changes being made to your property. We can assess it and determine whether it meets the criteria for addition to the National Heritage List for England.
- Where a building does not meet the criteria, we can recommend to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that a Certificate of Immunity from Listing is issued. This prevents the building or structure from being listed for 5 years from the date of issue, giving you the confidence to proceed with your application and permitted works
- If the building or structure does meet national criteria for listing, we are obliged to recommend that it is added to the List but determining its status at an early stage will provide you with certainty to move your proposals forward
Fast-track Listing
Our Fast-track Listing service provides clarity sooner over whether a building meets the criteria for listing or not.
If you would like us to consider a building for addition to the National Heritage List for England, we can fast-track your listing application as part of our paid-for Enhanced Advisory Services, rather than dealing with the application within our standard timeframe.
This guarantees our recommendation will be made within an agreed timetable, usually 12 weeks.
Screening for Potential Listing
Our Screening for Potential Listing service provides a way to reduce uncertainty early on in the development process when you need to find out whether a substantial area of land may contain buildings or structures that could merit our consideration for listing.
We will carry out a survey and provide a report to give our assessment of the likelihood of any above-ground heritage assets meriting further consideration for listing.
The report will also indicate heritage assets which may merit local designation; however decision-making on these is for the Local Planning Authority to determine.
This will be particularly helpful where blocks of land are being assembled for development or for disposal with a view to redevelopment, or where areas are under consideration for regeneration.
Please note: This service will not identify below-ground archaeological potential, which will need to be addressed separately with the Local Planning Authority.
Screening for Potential Listing is only available as a paid-for service.
How to apply
Please either contact your local Historic England office or email the Listing team.
For Fast-track Listing, Listing Enhancements and Certificates of Immunity (COIs), please complete our online application form. Full details are available on our How to Apply for Listing page.
Please be aware that applying under the Fast-track Listing service or the Listing Enhancement service doesn’t guarantee that we will take forward your application, but we will be in touch to discuss.
How you will be invoiced
Following an application for our paid-for service, we will carry out an initial assessment and be in touch to provide a copy of our full terms and conditions. This will include a price estimate for your case. For further details see our Prices for the Enhanced Advisory Services page.
Before we will begin work on your case we will raise an initial invoice of £450 excluding VAT. This will form part of the cost estimate provided to you. The £450 is a fixed fee to recover the cost of delivering these services. Please note all of our price estimates are provided exclusive of VAT. The amount will be £540 inclusive of VAT.
Once we have completed your case and sent our advice and recommendation over to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, we will then raise the final invoice to recover the final amount.
Our free listing service
Anyone can make a free application for amendment, addition or removal from the National Heritage List for England (NHLE).
Contact us
If you would like to discuss our Listing Services further, please contact your local Historic England office. For more general questions, please email the Listing Enquiries team.
