For most Bracknell homes the planning question is short. The town was designated a New Town on 17 June 1949, and the Development Corporation built ten planned neighbourhoods, from Priestwood to Crown Wood. Almost all of them sit outside the borough’s six conservation areas. A battery in a garage on one of those estates, with panels on the roof above, is about as simple a planning case as you will find in the Home Counties.
The exceptions are worth knowing before a design is fixed, and panels and batteries are not treated the same way. This guide explains which rules cover which piece of equipment, and where in Bracknell Forest they bite. For the battery itself, including size, the grid and what happens in a power cut, see our Bracknell home battery guide.
Panels and batteries sit under different rules
The permitted-development rules most people have heard of are in Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order. Class A covers solar PV and solar thermal equipment on a house. A home battery is not panel equipment. None of the claims we have checked contains a planning rule written specifically for domestic batteries, so we will not quote one.
In practice, most batteries go inside a garage, a utility room or a cupboard. If you want a unit on an outside wall in a conservation area, or anywhere on a listed building, the honest advice is to ask the council before anything is fixed.
Where Bracknell Forest’s designations are
The borough has six conservation areas. Five are named in our sources: Point Royal in Easthampstead, Church Lane Warfield, Winkfield Village, Winkfield Row and Wicks Green Binfield.
That is a short list by Home Counties standards, and it shapes the advice:
- The New Town estates: Priestwood, Wick Hill, Easthampstead, Bullbrook, Harmans Water, Wildridings, Great Hollands, Hanworth, Birch Hill and Crown Wood are almost entirely outside these areas. The ordinary Class A conditions apply.
- Warfield and Binfield: two of the six areas are here, so some older streets in RG42 need a check. The new Warfield homes north of the town, part of a development of some 2,200 homes, raise a different question: what the developer has already fitted.
- The villages: Winkfield and Winkfield Row are both designated, so it is worth checking there before you plan an outside battery unit or a garden array.
The Bracknell Forest Local Plan was adopted on 19 March 2024 and sets the borough’s development strategy to 2037. It governs new development. It does not change the householder solar rules below.
The rules for the panels, as they stand in 2026
Class A, as amended from 27 August 2026, makes roof-mounted solar on a house permitted development on these conditions:
- on a pitched roof, panels protrude no more than 0.2 m from the slope and sit no higher than the highest part of the roof, excluding chimneys;
- they are sited to minimise the effect on the building’s appearance;
- they are removed when no longer needed.
A conservation area adds one exclusion: equipment on a wall, balcony or roof enclosure that fronts a highway. Roof slopes, front ones included, are not restricted.
A flat-roof array in a conservation area needs an application to the council, before work starts, for a decision on whether prior approval of its appearance is needed. Stand-alone panels in a garden fall under Class B, which has its own limits. An Article 4 Direction can remove rights street by street, so read the direction itself if one is mentioned for your road.
Point Royal: the special case
Point Royal is the 18-storey tower of 102 flats in Easthampstead, designed by Arup Associates and built between 1961 and 1964. It is listed Grade II (NHLE 1390361). Three layers stack up there:
- Class A does not apply to a listed building, and Historic England says consent is needed for any PV installation on one.
- The Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 requires consent for alterations that would affect a listed building’s special character. That can include work inside, so a wall-mounted battery in a flat is not automatically exempt.
- Each flat shares a building, so the freeholder or management company must agree before anything is fitted.
That is three conversations before a survey makes sense.
Where the battery usually goes in a Bracknell house
The New Town houses were built with broadly consistent post-war roof forms, which keeps the panel side simple. For the battery, a garage, store or utility space, where a house has one, can usually take a wall-mounted unit out of living space and close to the consumer unit. The survey confirms which space works. 66.8% of Bracknell Forest households owned their home at the 2021 Census, so most can decide without a landlord. Private renting rose from 12.5% to 15.7% over the decade, and renters need the landlord’s agreement first.
If you have no panels at all, a battery can still run on a cheaper overnight tariff. Our guide to battery storage without solar panels covers when that makes sense.
Planning is not the grid
Bracknell’s town centre sits in SSEN Distribution’s Southern Electric Power Distribution area, about 11.9 km from the nearest other network. The grid step is separate from planning. A system whose inverters total up to 16 A (3.68 kW) per phase is notified under G98. Anything above that needs a G99 approval before work starts, and the battery’s inverter counts towards that total.
A standard grid-tied battery shuts down in a power cut unless backup has been designed in. Sizing comes from your own usage, as our home battery sizing guide explains.
If panels are part of the plan, our solar panels Bracknell page covers the RG12 and RG42 EPC picture and Switch Together Berkshire. For the wider county, see solar panels in Berkshire.
Sources: Bracknell Forest Council, conservation areas register and Local Plan (adopted 19 March 2024); The Royal Berkshire Archives, Bracknell New Town; Bracknell Town Council, Town History; Historic England, list entry 1390361 (Point Royal) and Installing photovoltaics: consents and permissions; GPDO 2015 Schedule 2 Part 14, as amended by S.I. 2026/896 (legislation.gov.uk); Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, section 7; ONS, How life has changed in Bracknell Forest: Census 2021; NESO, GB DNO licence area boundaries; SSEN, Who we are; ENA EREC G98 Issue 2.