Neighbour replacing historic extension

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I live in a terraced house. The attached neighbour has a large full width ground floor rear extension which is a bit of an eyesore and has a significant negative impact on our property. There is no record of the extension on the local authority planning portal, and I am pretty sure it would not be allowed under current planning rules. However, since it has been there a while (I would guess 20-30 years) we've always assumed we are stuck with it.

The house in question has recently sold to new owners and they're planning some significant reburbishment, likely to include demolishing the existing extension and rebuilding a new one in its place. Does anyone know what the rules are in this case? We would like to ensure any replacement extension is smaller and that the design has less impact on our property. Does the size and shape of the existing extension influence what the neighbours can replace it with i.e. is there an assumption a like for like replacement would be allowed? If we wanted to object on the grounds of unacceptable impact to our property (e.g. light, sight lines), does the fact that there is a existing extension weaken our case?
 
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You can only object on planning matters and not things being an eyesore or having negative impact on your property, as those are just your subjective opinions.

Read your council's planning policies for home extensions, and general planning policies, as those are the only relevenat things you can base you objections on.

If an extension is removed in entirety, any replacement has to follow current policies as if it is new and there was never an extension there previously.
 
Ok thanks, so any extension would need to follow the current rules. I'm not sure I understand the point about subjective opinions, the council's own planning decisions frequently refuse extensions on the grounds of them having an unacceptable impact on a neighbouring property, or being out of character for the area, both of those seem pretty subjective to me. The existing extension would certainly violate the 45 degree rule for overshadowing, if that helps? Our Council has become a lot stricter on full width and 'wraparound' extensions in recent years, so we are hoping that any replacement extension would not be allowed to be full width. However if I were the neighbours I would want probably want to argue for a more tasteful full width extension on the grounds that whatever they were planning to build had less impact on our property than the existing extension.
 
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The council will state what criteria they are assessing applications on.

Typical neighbour objections of "It looks awful " and "It's too big" and the like are just the neighbour's opinion, and that can be different to the planning policies in terms of what is awful and what is too big.

Light is a subjective thing too, but councils will often have a specific rule (the 45° rule) which deals with this.
 

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