Demolition Permits & Heritage Approvals in Bayside

The order matters more than anything else

There is one sequencing rule that decides whether your project runs smoothly or loses two months:

**Planning permit first. Then Section 29A consent. Then the building permit.**

Council *must* refuse a Section 29A request where a planning permit is required for the demolition and has not been obtained — or where what you are proposing differs from what the planning permit approved. Lodge in the wrong order and the refusal is automatic. You lose the fee and the weeks.

Which is why the very first step is not a form. It is finding out which overlays apply to your land.

Step one: what is over your property

**Heritage Overlay (Clause 43.01).** A planning permit is required to demolish or remove a building on a heritage place, with **no volume threshold**. Even a small demolition needs it.

This matters enormously in Brighton. Bayside has 23 residential and 3 commercial heritage precincts, and by name the overwhelming majority are Brighton and Brighton East streets — Grosvenor Estate, Normanby Estate, Elm Grove, Cowper Street, Hartley Street, Munro Street, New Street, North Road, Westley Avenue, Asling Street, Male Street, Moffat Street, Orchard Street, the Brighton Town Hall precinct and the Bay Street commercial precinct among them.

The exemption worth knowing

Demolishing an **outbuilding** in a Heritage Overlay — a garage, carport, pergola, verandah, deck or shed — still needs a planning permit, but under Clause 43.01-4 it is **exempt from advertising, from objection, and from third-party appeal rights**, unless that specific structure is named in the overlay schedule.

Demolishing the **house** gets the full public process. That single distinction can be the difference between weeks and many months, so it is worth establishing early which one you are actually doing.

**Neighbourhood Character Overlay (Clause 43.05).** Bayside introduced eight schedules in April 2025, and **all eight are Brighton streets** — Trafford Avenue, Cochrane Street with Edmanson Avenue and Ebden Street, Montrose Avenue, Missouri Avenue, Downes Avenue, Meyer Court, Pearson Street and Loller Street. Each one requires a planning permit to demolish a building.

These are new enough that a lot of advice online has not caught up. If you are on one of those streets, you need planning approval whether or not your house is heritage. Your planning property report will confirm what applies to your land.

**Vegetation controls.** A Vegetation Protection Overlay does not catch the demolition itself, but it does catch site clearing — Schedule 3 covers Black Rock, Beaumaris and parts of Cheltenham, protecting native vegetation over 2 metres tall.

**The overlay footprint is still growing.** Amendment C192bays was gazetted on 9 October 2025, adding Heritage Overlay protection to 51 post-war properties across Beaumaris, Black Rock, Brighton, Brighton East, Cheltenham and Sandringham. Bayside's Heritage Action Plan, adopted March 2025, sets a ten-year program of further identification.

There is also a mechanism most owners never hear about. Under Section 29B, if council asks the Minister to amend the planning scheme to protect your building while your consent application is already on foot, **assessment of that application must be suspended**. A house can effectively become heritage-protected while you are applying to demolish it. It is rare — but it is legislated, and it is the strongest argument there is for checking properly before you commit.

Step two: Section 29A report and consent

Report and consent under Section 29A of the Building Act 1993 is required when:

- the demolition, together with everything demolished on that building in the previous three years, exceeds **half the building's volume**; or - the demolition affects **any part of the facade**.

A full house demolition is always caught, being 100 per cent of the volume.

"Facade" is broader than you think

The Act defines it to include an external wall *and* any verandah, balcony, balustrade or architectural feature attached to it — plus **part of a roof**, and **a chimney** — where it faces a street and is at least partly visible from it.

So taking a tired verandah off the front of a Brighton Victorian needs council consent. So does removing a chimney, or a section of front roof. If the property faces two streets, either facade counts.

Two limits worth knowing, because they are widely stated wrongly. **Lanes, rights of way, footways and driveways are not streets** — a wall facing a rear laneway is not a facade for this purpose unless the volume test catches it. And if a building is completely obscured from the street, demolishing its facade does not require consent.

The mechanics

- **Fee: $99.30** for 2026–27. Set by regulation at 5.75 fee units and indexed each 1 July, so it is identical at every Victorian council. Stale figures of $93.90 and $96.60 circulating online are simply previous years. - **Decision: 15 business days**, counted from the day after lodgement and excluding weekends and Victorian public holidays. - **Decided by** the Municipal Building Surveyor. Councillors, the CEO, directors and managers cannot be involved. - **Lodged by** the owner, or an agent with the owner's written authority — which is where we come in. - **If council does not respond in time**, it is taken to have *consented*, and your surveyor can proceed. The exception: where a planning permit was required and not obtained, silence counts as a *refusal*. - **Refused?** The refusal flows through to your building permit, which can be appealed to the Building Appeals Board within 30 days. But if the real dispute is a heritage or planning refusal, the forum is VCAT, not the Board — these get conflated constantly.

What Bayside wants with the request: a written description of the proposed demolition, a site and demolition plan, the certificate of title, the property address and contact details, and confirmation of whether a planning permit has been obtained.

Reassuringly, council's discretion here is narrow. It must refuse where a required planning permit is missing, but it **must not otherwise refuse**. This is a compliance check, not a verdict on your project.

Step three: the building permit

The building permit comes from a **registered building surveyor**, private or municipal — not the council planning department. For a house, the surveyor has 10 business days to decide.

The application must include an outline and description of what is coming down, an allotment plan showing the building's relationship to boundaries, adjoining buildings, streets and crossings, the position of any hoardings and barricades, a written demolition procedure — and evidence that the demolisher has the **knowledge, experience, equipment and storage facilities** to do the job properly.

That last requirement is why Bayside says demolition permits are very rarely granted to owner-demolishers, and go instead to registered demolition contractors. Victoria registers demolishers in three classes — low rise, medium rise and unlimited — each requiring a formal qualification plus years of practical experience.

Once issued, work must **start within 12 months** and **finish within 24**, or the permit lapses.

The other approvals nobody warns you about

**Asset protection permit.** Protects council assets — footpaths, crossovers, roads, drains, signs, nature strips and nature-strip trees. You will not have to chase it: council is notified by the building surveyor's Section 29A notice, inspects the frontage and posts the paperwork to the registered owner. Application fee $367, plus a fully refundable bond somewhere between $2,500 and $50,000 depending on the site.

**Out-of-hours works permit.** Standard hours are 7am to 6pm weekdays and 9am to 3pm Saturday, and no permit can be issued for building works on a public holiday. Fee $341, allow five business days — and if granted, every occupant within a 200 metre radius must get at least two business days' notice.

**Tree permits — and this is usually the long pole.** A permit is required to remove, or prune more than 10 per cent of the canopy of, a tree with trunk circumference over 155 centimetres measured a metre above ground, plus anything on the Significant Tree Register. Removal is $466 for the first tree and $76 for each additional; pruning is $135 and $39.

Here is the part that catches people: a Local Law tree permit takes **60 days**. That is four times the Section 29A and six times the building permit. On a Brighton block with a mature canopy, the tree permit — not the demolition permit — sets your start date. It should be the first thing lodged, not the last. Council also warns that significant fines apply for illegal tree removal.

**Hoardings and street occupation.** Application $343, with occupation charged per square metre per week, and road closures charged per day. Any protective structure over the street alignment needs its own separate council consent, distinct from the 29A. Also worth knowing: no part of an external wall within three metres of the street alignment may be pulled down except during hours the building surveyor directs — which comes up constantly on Brighton's narrow frontages.

**Others as applicable:** vehicle crossing $365, stormwater connection $297, road opening $297.

Fees are as published at the time of writing and are reviewed periodically, so we confirm current figures when we lodge.

Realistic timing

- **Section 29A consent** — 15 business days, statutory - **Building permit** — 10 business days for the surveyor's decision - **Tree permit, if a protected tree is affected** — 60 days under the local law - **Planning permit, where an overlay applies** — 60 statutory days

That last figure needs an honest caveat, because it is routinely misread. The 60 days is not elapsed time. The clock stops while council waits for further information, during the public notice period, and while referral authorities respond. For a contested heritage house demolition in Bayside, **four to eight months** is realistic. If it goes to VCAT, add six to twelve months on top.

Demolishing an outbuilding is a different story — no advertising, no objections, no third-party appeals — and moves far faster.

**In practice:**

- No overlay, straightforward house: **six to ten weeks** from engagement to the first machine on site - Heritage or character overlay, house demolition: **six to twelve months** - Heritage overlay, garage or shed only: materially faster

The single best thing you can do is check the overlays today. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and it determines every date after it.