All posts tagged Prism News

120217HBCCoreStrat

Hartlepool Core Strategy Review

By on February 17, 2012 in Planning Policy, Public Consultation

Hartlepool Borough Council has published the last draft of its Core Strategy which will shape the future of planning in the Borough.

The Core Strategy sets out the main planning framework for the Borough for the next 15 years and has been drawn up following extensive public consultation over the past two years.

Consultation on the draft will run for the last time, from Monday 13th February to Monday 26th March. If you have any comments to make, or want to know more about the impact of the documents on you, get in touch with us today.

The headlines of the documents include:

  1. Allowing up to 5,400 new homes to be built over the next 15 years.
  2. Achieving this growth within the existing urban area as well as through a major new residential development to the south-west of the town and a smaller, limited area of new housing at Upper Warren.
  3. Earmarking Wynyard for further executive housing and prestigious business development and Elwick and Hart for small scale housing schemes.
  4. The creation of green spaces across the borough, including in Golden Flatts and in the new residential development in the south-west and the retention of the green areas which give a strategic gap between the town and Hart and Greatham.
  5. Promoting tourism and leisure developments, particularly at the marina, Seaton Carew and on the Headland.
  6. Policies to protect and enhance the town centre area and to support the creation of an innovation and skills quarter.
  7. Promoting the port, Oakesway Industrial Estate and the Southern Business Zone for business, recognising the town’s three new Enterprise Zones and safeguarding land for a new nuclear power station.

Following the conclusion of consultations, the draft Core Strategy will be examined at a public hearing by a Government Planning Inspector, ensuring that the document is realistic in its aims, the Inspector will also consider any comments made during the final consultation.

Landmark Appeal Ruling in Stockton

By on November 22, 2011 in Development Control

Prism Planning have just won a significant planning appeal relating to a site in Ingleby Barwick known as Blair Avenue which should change the way that a lot of planning is carried out in the Stockton area.

The site was a piece of land effectively left over from the historic development of the village of Ingleby Barwick and lay close to the village centre. The developer wanted to build a housing scheme for the over 55’s. The council were concerned that the site was an important area of open space and needed to be kept open. The Inspector disagreed with the Council position, noting that their evidence base was sketchy and out of date. None of the policies referred to by the Council should have been used in the way the Council sought.

However the real significance of the case is that the Inspector went on to apply the Community Infrastructure Regulations (CIL) to the Councils position and to note that their planning guidance on open space was fundamentally flawed. In particular the Council couldn’t reasonably demand money from a developer without analysing the problems of the area and being very specific about how the money would be used to improve the area.
The Inspector also went on to note that the Councils approach towards delivering off site affordable housing was similarly flawed, being overly complex and uncertain and preferred the simple and clear approach cited by Prism. Moreover the approach put forward by Prism was consistent with the way in which the government were funding and delivering affordable housing in the future.

These two key legal points should result in a very different approach being taken by the Council in the future which will more directly and transparently benefit local communities. In the future, the Council will need to accurately diagnose local opens space issues and propose specific solutions, instead of money being stored away for use on other sites as officers see fit. Communities will be able to expect a better understanding of their specific problems and also to expect improvements to doorstep provision.

The Inspector went on to agree with all the key points argued by Prism and found for the appellant, granting permission for a sheltered housing scheme on the site.

Protected Species pickle.

By on September 28, 2009 in Development Control

This months blog takes the form of a self confessed rant and allows me to blow off steam about one of the most frustrating aspects of planning –protected species.
We all accept that planning proposals can give rise to a wide range of impacts and that some impacts can be more significant than others. Proposals that impact upon a protected species (bat, badger newt etc) clearly fall into this category and rightly require very careful consideration. This has been the case for some time now and as developers agents we are used to procuring Phase 1 habitat surveys and breathing a huge sigh of relief when no bats or newts show up.
However bats aren’t as rare as perhaps we might expect and crop up frequently when dealing with buildings that have been up for a few years. Its fairly routine to find them associated with conversion schemes and to have to present detailed reports on their significance and how the development will work around them. I’ve recently been dealing with the conversion of some older buildings in which bats were found and the ecologists presented a detailed report on their numbers and significance. They provided a whole suit of mitigation measures including temporary bat boxes, and a bat loft to be built into the development proper as a permanent habitat. The roof on the building which gave the bats shelter was slowly being weathered away and the bats would soon lose their habitat through natural forces. The adjacent highway wasn’t so clever in high winds either with loose slates gusting down. Permission was initially refused on grounds that were nothing to do with bats and an appeal ensued. The inspector visited the site and looked at all of the bat issues. He gave consent, requiring the mitigation in the report to be implemented through a linking condition.
Now we get to the fun and games –despite having the permission granted at appeal, a European Protected Species Licence (EPSL) is required to implement the permission. The procedures for applying for this are set out in documentation provided by Natural England (NA). For anyone who has struggled with a new One App form, mastered it and thought themselves competent at form filling –think again. THE EPSL forms make planning forms seem like a ‘walk in the park’ and must be the most bureaucratic set of documentation ever to emerge from a quango. Seemingly the grant of planning permission is almost irrelevant in the process and the forms require a great deal of information on the need for the development and the benefit to society in undertaking the scheme. Referring back to the quasi judicial process of the appeal is evidently not sufficiently robust. One is left with the distinct impression that NA have determined their own parallel and far more stringent alternative to the planning system and its devised its own rules and interpretations on whether it is prepared to allow development. I know as an organisation they have often struggled to comment on applications within meaningful timescales –it seems they no longer have to worry about doing so, having devised their own alternative control system.
OK, I admit to being a little prejudiced about the new application system but I can’t help wondering whether the approach we now face is so overly complex, time consuming and anti-democratic that in the long run protected species will suffer through a system of controls that cannot be made to work in practice? The planning system has done an effective job of providing checks and balances for new development and has a long pedigree to prove it. To replace it, in practical terms if not in law, with the present cumbersome beast is, in my view a retrograde step. I think that those in charge of the new EPSL system should be encouraged to look again at their creation and consider whether it is really fit for purpose.

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!