Receiving a letter from your council's planning enforcement team is alarming. It usually arrives without warning, often in formal-sounding language, and frequently asks for a response within a short window. The natural reaction is to either panic and stop trading immediately, or to ignore it and hope it goes away. Both are bad answers. What follows is a practical guide for short-term let operators who have just received correspondence from a planning authority and need to know what to do next.
The right starting point is to identify, precisely, what kind of letter you have received. The response is different in each case.
The four main types of correspondence
1. An informal letter or email from the planning team. This is the most common form of contact for STL operators. It typically says something like: "we have reason to believe that your property is being used as a short-term let; please confirm whether planning permission has been granted." There is no statutory deadline. There is no immediate legal compulsion. But how you respond, and what you say (or don't say), can shape everything that follows.
2. A Planning Contravention Notice (PCN). Issued under Section 125 of the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997. This is an information-gathering notice. The Council is asking you, formally, to provide specified details about the property and its use. A PCN typically gives you 21 days to respond. Failure to respond to a PCN, or providing false or misleading information, is a criminal offence carrying a substantial fine. A PCN itself does not require you to stop operating, but it is a serious step and usually precedes further action.
3. An Enforcement Notice. Issued under Section 127 of the same Act. This is the formal instruction to remedy what the Council has determined is a breach of planning control. It will specify what must be done (typically: cease the short-term let use) and by when. Enforcement Notices carry a right of appeal to the DPEA. The appeal window is short and strictly enforced. If no appeal is lodged in time, the Notice takes full effect and continued breach becomes a criminal offence.
4. A Stop Notice or Temporary Stop Notice. Issued under Sections 140 or 144. These have immediate or near-immediate effect and require the use to cease at once. They are issued less often, but when they are, the consequences of non-compliance are severe.
There is also a fifth category - a Breach of Condition Notice (Section 145) - which applies where a planning condition has been broken. This is more relevant where you already have planning permission for something but are not complying with its conditions.
Step one: do not respond immediately
Whatever the letter says, do not respond on the same day you receive it, and do not respond without taking advice. This is the single most important point in this article.
Planning officers are skilled at framing questions in ways that elicit answers helpful to the Council's enforcement position and unhelpful to yours. The reply you give to an apparently innocuous question ("when did the short-term let use commence?") may be used as the cornerstone of a subsequent Enforcement Notice or Section 127 determination. A casual or defensive answer given in good faith can foreclose options that would otherwise have been available.
If the letter has a deadline that genuinely cannot be missed (a PCN at 21 days, an Enforcement Notice appeal window), the priority is to get advice inside that window. Almost all formal notices allow some scope to request a brief extension where there is a good reason, and a request through a professional adviser is usually treated more sympathetically than the same request from the operator directly.
Step two: do not change your operation in panic
There is a natural instinct, on receipt of any official-looking enforcement correspondence, to "just stop" until things are sorted out. This is almost always the wrong move.
In planning law, an established use is a defensible position. Continuity matters. Voluntarily ceasing your short-term let use before you have determined your legal position can weaken your hand in any later application, appeal, or proceedings. You may give the Council an evidential basis to argue that the use has been abandoned, which complicates everything that follows.
Equally, do not start removing online listings, deleting booking records, or restructuring your operation. Records are evidence, and an operator with a complete and well-organised set of records is in a far stronger position than one without.
The right response is to keep operating as you have been, while you get proper advice and develop your strategy.
Step three: think carefully about your evidence
Evidence sits at the centre of any enforcement case, and it cuts both ways.
If your short-term let use has been continuous for ten years or more, evidence is overwhelmingly in your favour. After 10 years of continuous unauthorised use without enforcement action being taken, the use becomes immune from enforcement and a Certificate of Lawfulness for Existing Use or Development can be sought on that basis. In that scenario, you want the most complete and well-documented evidence pack possible. The standard items are:
- Booking records from all platforms (Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO, direct site, agent)
- Statements and tax records showing STL income year on year
- Council tax / non-domestic rates records for the property
- Photographs of the property in use, ideally dated
- Sample marketing materials (listings, brochures, screenshots)
- Correspondence with neighbours, the licensing authority, or any council department
- Floor plans
- Insurance documentation confirming the use insured
- Any prior planning correspondence for the property
If your use is shorter than ten years, the same evidence is a double-edged sword. The records that prove the use to you may equally prove to the Council that the use began on a specific recent date, foreclosing any immunity argument and supplying the enforcement case against you on a plate.
It is worth being specific about how this plays out in practice. The most common source of evidence used by Scottish councils in STL enforcement cases is the operators own online footprint, particularly publicly visible Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO listings, and the reviews against them. Reviews carry dates. Listings carry "host since" data. Photos carry metadata. Enforcement officers routinely use these as a low-cost, well-dated evidence chain that establishes when the use began, how often it has happened, and on what scale. None of this is recoverable once it is in the Councils hands.
Two practical implications:
1. Keep all your records. Do not delete or destroy anything. Deleting records once an enforcement matter is live can be construed as tampering and weakens your credibility profoundly. 2. But do not volunteer evidence to the Council before you have a strategy. A Planning Contravention Notice may legally require you to provide specified information; an informal letter does not. The distinction matters. A casual reply that hands over recent booking history, before you have had advice and before you have weighed the immunity argument, can be the moment your case is lost.
This is precisely the kind of strategic call where an experienced adviser earns their fee. The right evidence position, presented at the right time, is often the difference between a matter resolved quietly at the informal stage and a formal Enforcement Notice.
Step four: take proper advice
This is not a moment for guesswork or for relying on what you have read on a forum. The interaction of planning law, licensing law, and the specific position of your council requires expert input. The cost of getting this wrong at the early stage materially exceeds the cost of getting proper advice in.
A planning consultant with specific STL experience can:
- Identify exactly what the letter is and what is at stake
- Confirm the statutory deadlines that apply
- Assess your evidence and your defensive position
- Draft your formal response to the Council
- Where appropriate, lodge a Certificate of Lawfulness for Existing Use or Development (CLEUD) application that may displace the enforcement process altogether
- Where an Enforcement Notice is in force, prepare and lodge an appeal to the DPEA inside the statutory window
A well-drafted response, supported by good evidence, will frequently resolve a matter without it progressing to formal enforcement at all. We have seen many cases where what started as an aggressive-looking enforcement letter was resolved at the informal stage simply because the operator engaged a competent adviser early.
The role of a Certificate of Lawfulness
A CLEUD is the strongest defensive tool available to an operator in this situation, where the established use can be evidenced. It is a formal determination by the planning authority that the existing use is lawful and not in breach of planning control. Once granted, a CLEUD effectively removes the Council's ability to pursue enforcement on the same facts.
For many established STL operators, particularly those whose use began before any control area or restrictive policy was introduced in their area, a CLEUD is both achievable and durable. The combination of a properly evidenced CLEUD application and a robust response to the enforcement letter can be transformative.
This is one of the reasons we consistently advise operators to consider a CLEUD before they are pushed into one by enforcement. Acting in advance, while the position is your own to define, is always preferable to acting under the time pressure of an enforcement notice.
The appeal route
If matters proceed to a formal Enforcement Notice, the appeal route is to the DPEA. There are seven statutory grounds of appeal under Section 130 of the 1997 Act, ranging from "the matters alleged do not constitute a breach of planning control" to procedural challenges and matters going to the substantive merits of the alleged breach.
Appeals are determined either on written submissions, in a hearing, or in a full inquiry, depending on the nature and complexity of the case. The DPEA's decision can itself be challenged in the Court of Session on legal grounds.
Appeals are demanding to prepare and conduct properly. A well-presented appeal at the DPEA is often the operator's best (and sometimes only) chance to overturn a flawed enforcement decision, or to argue for more trading time on a point of equity even where the appeal is ultimately dismissed.
A few things to remember
- Time is short. Every formal notice has a statutory deadline. Missing it is usually fatal.
- Your licence does not protect you. Holding a valid short-term let licence does not, in itself, satisfy your planning obligations. The two regimes are separate.
- Do not communicate with the Council without advice in place. Including by phone. Anything you say can be used.
- Do not stop operating. Continue as you have been until your legal position is clear.
- Preserve your records. Everything matters.
- It is almost always worth appealing a formal Notice. A competent appeal forestalls the effect of an Enforcement Notice, allowing the operation to continue in the meantime. The continued income can exceed the cost of having an adviser prepare and oversee the appeal.
How STL Solutions can help
STL Solutions handles planning enforcement matters across all 32 Scottish councils. We have:
- Responded to thousands of planning correspondences and notices on operators' behalf
- Lodged successful CLEUDs that have displaced enforcement entirely
- Prepared and presented DPEA appeals across the spectrum from written submissions to full inquiry
- Negotiated resolutions with planning authorities at every stage of the process
If you have received correspondence from your planning authority and need to know what to do next, please get in touch. Early intervention almost always produces a better outcome.
Book a free 15-minute consultation or start a Certificate of Lawfulness application.
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Ross Armstrong Head of Professional Services, STL Solutions
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