I love it when a plan comes together
Freedom to operate presents an opportunity to innovate and make things better.
Strip away that freedom and you must conform, sometimes to a silly or frustrating process and it’s not all that fun. This was my experience with submitting planning.
The planning department are under-resourced
House planning help is a green and self build podcast. In one episode an ex planning officer describes the process from their side. The planning department bears the brunt of the flack from builders and locals. They have to follow the rules and these rules are what people get frustrated by.
Some things I didn’t know:
Planning dept lose money on each application — While £400 isn’t cheap it doesn’t cover all the hoops and consultations they have to jump through.
Quotas are dictated to them— It would be nice if planning was proactive from the start but instead they have to meet quotas by granting ad-hoc applications. The UK is famous for NIMBYism which can make this a thankless task.
It’s getting harder — each project is different and there is additional burdens from independent appraisals, complaints and appeals. Big projects can also take years meaning there are many complex projects to keep track of.
So in light of this workload it’s understandable to see why the planning department operate the way they do. Throw everything back at the applicant until it contains third party reports on everything, removing the need for any intuition or judgement other than ticking the boxes of the planning framework.
Our application
The story of getting our application ready is not different from any other. Bureaucratic delays, pointless reports and room for common sense.
We want our house to be different from the normal inefficient, hat roof box you see developers throw up. Something which is better for the environment, encourages biodiversity and blends into the land and surrounding and improves rather than detracts from the local area. We also want it to be a superb place for us to live, comfortable and well thought out for our lifestyle.
All things which mean it’ll be a wonderful, comfortable home and reduce impact on the environment but is more challenging to squeeze through a planning process designed for normal developers.
Still we got there — this is an overview of the parts of the application:
Summary
The planning department write a few lines to summarise our project. They came up with:
Construction of a single detached two storey dwelling and landscaping works. The house is built into the land and is visible above ground level by no more than 1.6 metres on the Northern West Hill roadside.
It does the job but I would understand if people read ‘two storey’, miss the context of the second line and get upset thinking it will be a tall building.
Design and access statement
The design and access statement an expression of we are trying to do and why. It provides an overview of how various aspects of the building harmonise with the area and environment. This is something I feel works well albeit fairly light on detail.
Elevations
Designing the house was fun and the resulting building is subtle, practical, exciting and designed to fit with the surroundings. The 2D elevations give some idea of the design but definitely miss context. For example, you could see the east elevation and think it’s bland but in context it’s hidden by a hedge and is surrounded by tall buildings so won’t be noticed and didn’t need much detail.
Reports
Each application needs a bunch of reports. Given the previous application was granted and contained a full set of reports I naively through we could just re-submit with the new design.
In our first attempt we figured the only thing which has changed is the ecology of the site. We had a professional come and perform a full survey for bats, newts, badgers, lizards and protected plants & animal species (£700). There was nothing found so we figured no further reports required.
Covid slowed the application but we eventually found out that the original application didn’t validate because we needed to renew all the previous reports:
- SUDS (drainage)
- Tree study & arboricultural impact assessment
- Topographical survey
- Land stability assessment
- Badger report
These weren’t submitted as common sense says that a site with no trees doesn’t need a tree study. Geology changes over millions of years so we figured the previous topographical survey and land stability assessment from 4 years ago would be sufficient. Our full ecological study explicitly said there was no evidence of badgers so why a dedicated report was required was super confusing.
So we arranged a tree study to say there are three young sycamores the same as before (£400) and that the impact of these tiny trees would still not affect the building (£350). We had a new topological survey and land stability report done which is the same as the old one (£800). We then had a specialist come and look for evidence of badgers in the day and evening and write a report (£200).
Submitting
Finally our application was accepted. The new reports cost £1,750 on top of the original £800 ecological study. Architect and Passivehaus design totals about £9k so far and the submission is about £400. Add to that all our own time and it’s not a cheap process.
The reports and delays mean we’re about 6 months behind where we wanted to be (partly owing to organising visits around covid lockdown). Frustrating as reports have added no additional knowledge vs the reports in the previous granted application.
So the planning is submitted now, woohoo! We don’t know how long the process will take during Covid but hope to receive an update soon 🙏
