Yes, and for most homes the rules are the ordinary ones. No conservation area covers the village. Listed buildings are a small minority. The neighbours put in planning applications constantly. If anything gets in the way of your extension, it's more likely to live next door than work at the council.
Southwater has 31 listed buildings. None are Grade I, three are Grade II* and 28 are Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, so changing one needs listed building consent on top of any planning permission, and heritage officers take an interest in details most owners had never thought about. If you're buying one of the 31, budget for that patience. If you're buying anything else, which in a village built mostly in the late twentieth century is almost certainly the case, none of this applies to you.
The rest of the village is evidence that people change their homes here all the time. Between April 2024 and June 2026, 1,668 planning applications were logged for the area, 756 of them in the latest twelve months. That's a steady run of extensions, conversions, garden rooms and new windows, and a reliable sign that a builder's van on the drive is part of the scenery.
What that means in practice: with no conservation area, an ordinary house here keeps its full permitted development rights, so many single-storey rear extensions, loft conversions and outbuildings within the national size limits can go ahead without a full planning application. Anything bigger, anything facing the street, or anything on a home whose rights were removed when the estate was built needs consent from Horsham District Council. Check the title and the original planning conditions before you draw up plans. Developers of estates from this era sometimes stripped those rights out, and finding that out after the architect's invoice is an expensive lesson in reading the small print.
Freedom to extend is one of Southwater's strengths. Outside a handful of listed buildings, the main constraints are your budget, the size limits and whether the neighbours take it personally.