Yes, for most houses, with the usual caveat that a chunk of the village is old enough to have opinions. Twenty-three listed buildings sit inside the area. Two conservation areas cover parts of the parish. Somewhere close to a hundred and fifty planning applications went through in the last year alone, so the system plainly says yes far more often than it says no. The rule of thumb is simple: if your house is ordinary, you have room to work, and if it is one of the ones the heritage people already know by name, you are entering a longer conversation.
Listing is the part that decides how much freedom you actually have. The village carries twenty-three listed buildings in total. Two of them are Grade one, the top tier, which is the planning equivalent of the property being untouchable without a very good reason and a very patient architect. Another two are Grade two star, and the remaining nineteen are Grade two, the standard listing. Urchinwood Manor is one of the Grade two star names on that roll, and the Village Cross is protected in its own right. If you own one of these, listed building consent governs almost anything you do to the fabric, inside and out, and swapping a window becomes a formal application rather than a Saturday job. The great majority of Congresbury homes are not on this list. For those owners, the listings are a neighbour's problem, not theirs.
Conservation areas widen the net a little further. There are two of them in the parish, at Congresbury and at Yatton, and living inside one adds a layer of control that a house on an unremarkable estate simply does not face. Certain works that would be automatic elsewhere need consent within a conservation boundary, and the council gets a say on how alterations sit against the character of the place. It is not a veto on extending. It is the planning department reminding you that the street was here first.
In practice, the whole thing splits neatly down the middle. If your house sits outside the conservation lines and carries no listing, a good deal of what most owners want to do falls under permitted development, and the rest is a routine application in a village that clearly processes them by the hundred. If your house is listed, or inside one of the two conservation areas, assume nothing is permitted until someone with a stamp agrees, and budget for the extra time before you buy the materials. The postcode is doing the sorting here, and the two categories of owner live in different worlds.
Freedom to extend in Congresbury is middling, which is the honest answer for a village with genuine history and plenty of ordinary housing sitting next to it. Buy an unlisted house away from the conservation lines and you have most of the latitude you would get anywhere. Buy a listed one and the building calls the shots, not you.