Planning permission is infuriating. Even if (or especially if?) you do things by the book.
We had planned to start structural build work in August 2020. In May I drafted up a beautifully organised project plan. Looking back now that was clearly more than a little ambitious and we’re coming up to a year of having lived in the property having only recently ‘sorted out’ planning permission.
One of the delays was obviously the appearance of Covid, not much can be done about that. Another factor we hadn’t considered was that our neighbours might be interested in joining us which works great for both parties meaning you can agree and work together but does just take longer as they had to then draft up plans with the architect for what they wanted. We submitted separate loft conversion planning applications and a joint extension planning application in September 2020 and obtained planning permission from the council in January 2021.
Lessons learned:
- Keep a close eye on the communications between your agent and your council to make sure your application is passing through the validation stage and any issues or further details required are resolved early. Also be aware of Chinese whispers between parties involved and be very clear in your communications with the agent. We said ‘we would rather not’ to an extension for the council to consider our application and detailed out the reasons why which turned into a yes between the agent and the council which we were not aware of until we put in an official complaint.
- The council has an 8 week turnaround time to review planning applications but if they decide to extend this, there is nothing you can do about it. With hindsight, I would have leaned towards the lawful planning development certificate which is more of a notification to the council and gotten on with it. There were delays in terms of validations and then the council implemented a new system and decided it would increase our time limit for a response by another 6 weeks (which meant we were living in a wreck with a broken boiler and leaking roof over winter with no prospect of making any progress). This was fairly depressing as it’s entirely out of your control.
- If you can, stick to what has been agreed before in terms of lengths of extension etc. as this could avoid a lot of pain and lost time going back and forwards negotiating what is acceptable. If you can and don’t need to because it comes under permitted development, don’t apply for planning permission in the first place!