Yes, in most cases, and without heritage officers queuing at the door. Listed buildings are rare. There's no conservation area. Most of the housing is post-war and nobody is trying to preserve it. What stands between you and a bigger kitchen is ordinary planning and the neighbours, not history.
There are 42 listed buildings in the area: none at grade I, 2 at grade II* and 40 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, and doing the work without it is a criminal offence, not a paperwork slip. If you're buying one of those 42, budget for specialist advice and slow decisions. If you're buying one of the thousands of homes around them, listing won't come into it.
There is 1 scheduled monument in the area, the strictest level of protection there is. It matters only if your land sits on or next to it, and for almost every house in town it won't.
The neighbours are not waiting for permission to dream. Between April 2024 and June 2026, 677 planning applications were lodged, 337 of them in the last twelve months. That's a town that builds out, up and back, one semi at a time, and it shows that altering homes here is routine rather than a battle.
In practice, many single-storey rear extensions, loft conversions and outbuildings on an ordinary Yateley house may fall under permitted development rights, meaning no full planning application, as long as the property isn't listed and those rights haven't been removed on the estate. Anything bigger, taller or closer to the boundary goes through Hart's normal planning process. Check with the council before you book a builder. Some estates had their permitted development rights stripped when they were built, and the deeds won't warn you.
Your freedom to extend is fair rather than generous: heritage barely comes into it, but ordinary planning rules, estate-level restrictions and the people next door still get their say.