All posts tagged planning consultant

Localism in Practice

By on June 20, 2011 in Development Control, Localism

Prism Planning has been very busy recently testing out the principles of the Localism Agenda. It is quite clear that once the Localism Bill becomes statute the general public will potentially have a strong mandate to shape their communities through the planning system.

Private developers have been quite cautious of these proposals. It has been argued that some conservative (note the little ‘c’) thinkers will simply become Nimby’s to the extreme – we at Prism have a much more positive outlook on the Bill, and recent jobs have only strengthened our views; let’s look at two which illustrate our point:

We have been involved in a residential scheme in the Haxby Road area of York. The project for affordable housing on the site of a former Co-operative Dairy created quite a stir locally. The Planning Officers recommended the scheme for approval, but during the Committee politics took its course and permission was refused.

During the Appeal it was quite clear that there were no hard and fast planning issues which meant that the scheme should be refused. The Inspector agreed with us and permission was subsequently granted with a partial award of costs.

The second case was closer to home, in Darlington where we are based, and was to a certain extent, a mirror image of that of Haxby Road. It involved the refurbishment of an existing Georgian house, through the development of two subservient homes within its large residential curtilage.

The Council in this case were against the proposals for reasons of conservation and planning policy. However following extensive consultation with local people it became increasingly obvious that the public were in support of the scheme and wanted the application to be approved. Once the day of Planning Committee came around, an army of supporters (and one or two objectors) made their presence known and the officers’ recommendation was overturned by the committee.

The point which I am trying to make is a simple one, the Localism Bill is not a “Nimby’s Charter”. The Bill will not give the public the ability to impose a negative planning agenda. Recent Ministerial Statements have argued that planning needs to be for growth and sustainability and just at these two cases show; if the public want to make a real positive impact through the planning system, they can!

Amending your hard won planning permission

By on July 1, 2009 in Development Control

In the good old days, if you were building your new house and wanted to move your bathroom window a couple of feet from where it was shown on the approved plans, you simply wrote to the planners, politely requested a change to the plans and a few days later got a letter back telling you to go ahead, it was being treated as a minor amendment.

Since such straightforward times, case law has radically overturned such a relaxed approach and has triggered the need for the submission of revised applications for a host of trivial and non-contentious amendments to plans that had already been approved. The current approach is clumsy, time consuming and expensive, with fees for revised applications being the same as the original application fee. Small wonder that respondents to the recent ‘Killian Pretty review’ cited this area of planning as one of the most frustrating subjects, leading the review to conclude that urgent action was needed in this area.
At long last changes are going to take place to allow minor modifications to take place. However, as always, its not quite so straightforward as it might be and the government are currently consulting on how the necessary changes are going to work.

Firstly the Government are drawing a distinction between non-material amendments and minor material amendments with different routes being proposed under each heading.

A non-material amendment is a new option, introduced under Section 96A of the 1990 Planning Act. It won’t be a planning application in the conventional sense so won’t require extensive consultation statutory consultees although interested parties look like getting 14 days to comment. There isn’t going to be a definition of what is encompassed by the meaning of ‘non-material’ –each council will have to form its own view on this point. (Hurrah -I hear the lawyers cry!) The current approach looks like giving the LPA’s 28 days to turn around requests and a suggested flat rate fee of £170. The fee might be reduced to £25 for householders. However, it is likely that the new provisions will come into effect in October of this year but the ability to charge for them won’t be in place until sometime after this date. During this period, all applications will be free!
A minor material amendment is likely to be one whose scale and nature results in a development which is not substantially different from the one which has been approved. At present the government seem to think that this area will be deal with by means of an application under S73 of the Planning Act –the same facility we currently use to try and modify a condition on a plan. In this case, the condition we will be trying to modify is the condition which either lists the approved plans or which requires compliance with the approved plans. Its not yet clear what additional information might form the basis of an application and the government are going to be carrying out further consultations over the summer on this particular point. At present we are reminded that an application under Section 73 results in a new permission being granted so consultees are entitled to view and comment in the normal way. This seems to suggest that not a lots going to change!

Its not likely that the last option will result in a fast track route to fine tuning an existing permission although it will be relatively cheap at £170 a go. Its also helpful to have clarified that this route is open to practitioners as there has been some doubt in the minds of a few LPA’s. Of course, if the LPA in question haven’t helpfully recited all of the approved plans in a condition in the first place, this approach isn’t going to be of any particular use. We can therefore expect all LPA’s to start to list all of the approved plans forming the basis of their decision from here on in. If they don’t, you need to challenge them to do so !

From a practitioners viewpoint, it seems as if the minor material route is likely to be the one we need to use most frequently and its clearly going to be a cumbersome beast taking around 8 weeks a time to deal with. Still, on the up side its clearly going to be helpful to have something that we don’t currently have in place.

It’s not immediately apparent that it’s going to save a great deal of paperwork either as it will be applied for on the national forms with seemingly all of the normal application requirements. Cynics might still suspect that an application to move a bathroom window will still need to have a bat survey to validate the application! The days of the letter requesting a minor amendment seem to have firmly vanished with no immediate prospect of return!