Singing Pig

OK guys and gals, here - at the suggestion of the forum's reincarnation of Douglas Bader - is your first FREE lesson about winning planning permission for development. (And bear in mind that, in the context of the planning system, "land" includes any buildings on the land.)

I hope that the information I aspire to make available here will help some of you ... without taking up too much of my scarce working time.

Feel free to ask if you have a question. 

( I hope I'm not starting something I can't finish here ! I'll probably have to do it in the evenings, and may miss a few of those. Hopefully it won't get out of hand, but you know how it is when you offer something for nothing - everyone wants to buy it !)

Here we go then ..............

QUESTION : What determines whether or not you can win planning permission for development of land, and if so, for what ?

ANSWER: Section 70(2) of the Town & Country Planning Act 1990 and 38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 are clear that all planning applications should be determined in accordance with the policies of the Development Plan and other material considerations. And that it should be on the policies of the Development Plan unless other material considerations indicate otherwise.

So the primary consideration is : Is the proposal supported by Development Plan policies ? If so, you are on a definite "starter".

What if it is NOT ? What are these "Other Material Considerations" that can override those policies?

Well, the Courts have ruled that they can be anything relevant to the use or development of land, so it is a wide field for those who need to buck a development plan policy, and who can be "inventive" in finding reasons why it shouldn't prevail in a particular case.

But they don't include personal considerations - for example the effect of the proposal on house prices in the area, or on a view currently enjoyed and which would be lost if the development proposal was implemented.

The whole planning system in England & Wales is founded on the above principles. And the 8,000 pages of planning law - or at least the bits YOU are likely to come across - become much simpler once you understand those principles.

Trevor 

Thank you BTS.

It will probably be a bit basic for you, but I'm sure you will chip in if you can add something I've overlooked. (I have no teaching qualifications !)

Good start to a thread and a useful one to many people on here;

Specific to my area we have a little bird called the 'Dartford Warbler' which has been causing planning chaos - its a ground nesting bird and is protected by English Trust - So any developer looking at knocking down one house and building more than one unit back in its place and the site falls within 5km of a site that these little darlings live on (which is pretty much most of the Thames Valley) - then the councils were refusing planning permission. The reason behind this was that if you replace one house with say 2 houses or 12 flats then the chance is that the owners will have cats and dogs and teh birds would be under threat. 

The cats go off on their own and the dogs get walked where the birds nest. It got to the stage that in one council they were just refusing all applications across the board until the council could get to grips with what this all meant. 

In the end most councils have got round this with a new copycat S106 payment - which means a per bedroom payment supposidly for teh council to set aside land for these birds. Planning applications not only neaded a design and access statement but also an explination of why this particular rule should not be  used on any specific application.

I had one developer who went to the particular SPA area that was being questioned by the council and asked everyone he could for their road / postcode over a 3 day period so he could prove to the council that they had not come from the area that he was planning to develop.

The joys of planning. 

Thanks Longcross. I just hope it doesn't get out of hand with several dozen people asking things all at once. We'll just play it by ear.

The good old Dartford Warbler eh ? Yes, he's a ****** nuisance, that one ! As are bats, owls, great crested newts, badgers and all the other fauna (and flora) that that the planning authority can take advantage of to bolster otherwise weak reasons for refusal.

Greene King have brewing premises just outside Bury St Edmunds and it necessitated their many lorries going into BSE and out again on both inward and outward journeys. They proposed to put a short road across the water meadow to the nearest thing BSE has got to a Ring Road ... and all hell broke loose because there were naturally newts on the water meadow. It ended up in the High Court at the hands of the protesters, who at one point formed a camp on the water meadow, while the more pragmatic amongst us all prayed hard for rain !

The road went in eventually. What happened to the newts? Well, I wished them no harm, and they did what it was obvious all along that they would do .... they moved a bit to each side when the road went through, and they lived on the remaining part of the water meadow happily ever after.

A lot of people in Bury St Edmunds lived happily ever after too, because they no longer had 40-60 lorries a day trundling past their terraced homes which were right on the edge of the pavement of the road Greene King's lorries had to use.

I'm all for preserving plant life and wildlife - and even trees, which are often used via an imaginative TPO to thwart a proposal which would otherwise not be refusable. But we have to keep a sense of priorities. What is more important after all - that 3 families get a home to live in, or that a family of newts (or indeed Dartford Warblers, butterflies, or whatever) don't have to move a few metres away from the spot they have chosen to live?

It is, as you infer, one of the dafter aspects of our planning system.

Re: the creative TPO's - an old favorite solution is copper nails in the trunk, usually after allowing a refusal on those grounds, so that their cards are already on the table, and they can't throw some other excuse at you later on.

My favorite gripe about PPS3 is the dual method of measuring density, on the one hand you have the sensible measure of dwellings per hectare; then on the other there is the habitable rooms per hectare measure, which throws the whole thing into complete chaos.  I'm yet to determine any pattern on the use of this measure (Trevor if you know of the criteria for choosing between the two please pray do reveal it!) - but it has the result of, in some authorities, developers building 'two bedroom' houses, which happen to have two or three 'studies' upstairs which would make very convenient bedrooms, and in other authorities, it is used by the LA to dictate the mix of dwellings on the development, often flying in the face of market forces.

One day I'll get to grips with PPS7, and get myself planning for a great big modern mansion on the greenbelt somewhere.... if only, eh?

** post deleted as I was told by the system that my post had failed - so I retyped it, only to find it a duplicate.  Grrrr **

BTS King:

Re: the creative TPO's - an old favorite solution is copper nails in the trunk, usually after allowing a refusal on those grounds, so that their cards are already on the table, and they can't throw some other excuse at you later on.

My favorite gripe about PPS3 is the dual method of measuring density, on the one hand you have the sensible measure of dwellings per hectare; then on the other there is the habitable rooms per hectare measure, which throws the whole thing into complete chaos.  I'm yet to determine any pattern on the use of this measure (Trevor if you know of the criteria for choosing between the two please pray do reveal it!) - but it has the result of, in some authorities, developers building 'two bedroom' houses, which happen to have two or three 'studies' upstairs which would make very convenient bedrooms, and in other authorities, it is used by the LA to dictate the mix of dwellings on the development, often flying in the face of market forces.

One day I'll get to grips with PPS7, and get myself planning for a great big modern mansion on the greenbelt somewhere.... if only, eh?

Yes BTS, copper nails work, but Tree Officers know about the strategy and can detect it. Pig urine on the roots is, I am assured by a pig farmer and tree surgeon friend, even more effective. It is evidently like battery acid ! But how one collects it I do not know.***

 Yes, you've got the inconsistencies of PPS3 off to a "T". And PPS7 is nearly as bad, but the qualification criteria for temporary and permanent rural dwellings are relatively clear, which is what we mostly use it for.

How you reconcile the crazy density conflicts in PPS3 I'm afraid I can throw no light on. I begin to think we are not supposed to understand it anyway. Hence the abundance of "can" "may" "normally" and other vague words in national guidance which leave all options open. (Hey - 2-bedroomed houses with 3 studies is a great wheeze - thank you !)

As for building  "a great big modern mansion on the greenbelt somewhere" .... methinks you know a LOT more about this subject than you have let on !  Only with PPS7 was the "modern" bit added - predictably by a Labour administration that didn't want to see a lot of pseudo-landed-gentry type dwellings being erected in the countryside. (OK if they are nice Socialist blue-stained timber and glass dwellings with a Tesco design ambience !)

*** Talking about collecting pig's urine, reminds me of an appeal hearing I won for an equestrian stud farm, with residential accommodation, in Lancashire. My client, a very prim and proper classy-looking blonde lady called Jill in her late 30's, was explaining that part of her income from the stud came from selling semen from a £60,000 Arab stallion, and that the semen was frozen, sealed in drinking straws, and sent to buyers all over Europe and as far away as Israel. (Believe it or not, Israelis are very keen on Arab horses!)

The 60-odd year old spinster planning officer naively asked "Really? How do you, erm, collect the semen?"

The Hearing went into a stunned silence as Jill explained how they brought a gym horse into the stable and persuaded the stallion to mount it and look out of the window in front of it. A mare would then be paraded back and forth in front of this window to "arouse" the stallion.

"Yes, but how do you collect it ?" asked the planning maid, whose naivity was getting worse by the minute.

"Well, I hold a bucket in my left hand" continued my client, "and, with my right hand I grasp ....." (I will leave the rest to the imagination of readers!) The room fell into a stunned silence when she stopped explaining - a deafening silence that lasted for about 40 seconds.

To break the silence, I said to the lady Inspector, who was gallantly trying not to grin all over her face, "I am sure we have all learned something today" at which point the entire room rang with laughter.

(Planning does occasionally have a comical side.)