If you are having issues accessing your Open Portal account, then please call our Revenues and Benefits team on 03004 560 560.

You can find information on the planning rules for more than 50 common home building projects on the national Planning Portal website.

If you still don’t know if you need planning permission or not, then you can submit a pre-application advice or permitted development enquiry.

We do not need full plans for this service, just an idea of what you are thinking of. Hand drawn plans with rough measurements are fine. We will also need a plan of where the building would be.

A planning officer will look at the information you have sent and give you a response within 15 working days.

There is a charge for this service. If planning permission is needed, you will be given advice on what information to submit to get an application through the planning process.

Read our other Planning FAQs.

We used to offer a food waste collection service, but we removed it about ten years ago. This is because it was poorly used and cost about £600,000 a year to run. A survey of residents at the time supported our decision to remove the service to save money. As part of the Environment Act, the Government wants all councils in England to offer a weekly food waste service. All councils in Worcestershire are working together on the detail of what this means for our residents while we wait for more information from the Government. We will provide an update to residents as soon as we know more.

Try our waste and recycling searchable database. It contains thousands of items. If you cannot find the item you are looking for, then you can make a suggestion and we can find the answer and add it to our list.