Yes, and in Aveley the planning rules matter less than the ground underneath. There's no conservation area. Only ten buildings are listed. The neighbours put in about two hundred planning applications in a single year. The real constraint is clay that swells and shrinks.
Aveley has 10 listed buildings: one at Grade I, one at Grade II* and eight at Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, so any change that affects its character needs listed building consent on top of any planning permission. With ten such buildings in a village of family homes, the odds are that the house you're looking at isn't one of them. Aveley was in the Domesday Book in 1086, and it has kept a short list of protected buildings and very few rules for everyone else.
One scheduled monument, the strictest tier of protection, is within the area, and it only matters if you own land next to it.
Thurrock Council's planning register shows 429 applications in Aveley between April 2024 and June 2026, and 202 of them in the latest twelve months. Every one of those is a household deciding the house it bought wasn't quite big enough. The name Aveley comes from a woman called Ælfgȳth's clearing in a wood, and making room is still what the village does.
The British Geological Survey puts Aveley's ground at class 3 for shrink-swell, and the whole area reaches that class. It's also class 3 for compressible ground, across the whole area. Shrink-swell means clay that expands when wet and shrinks when dry, and that movement can crack foundations that aren't deep enough. For an extension, that means getting a structural engineer to look at the soil early, and planning for footings deeper than a builder working from habit might dig. Trees near the new walls matter too, because roots dry the clay out. None of this is a reason not to build. It's a reason to put money into the foundations, where nobody will see it.
Most houses in Aveley are neither listed nor in a conservation area, so many rear extensions, loft conversions and outbuildings may fall under permitted development rights and need no planning application, within the national limits on size and height. Bigger or more unusual schemes go to Thurrock Council for planning permission in the normal way. Some estates had their permitted development rights removed when they were built, so before buying, ask the council whether that applies to the specific house you're interested in.
Extending a house is one of the things Aveley makes easy: the planning rules are light, and the main work is getting the foundations right in the clay.