Planning Process

It’s been interesting to see this weekend about the way the government is planning to change the planning application process. Of course, it’s going to come in too late for us, as we made our planning application for extensions to the new place last week.

In some ways I think it’s good that the process is being relaxed, and made easier to navigate. But at the same time I can see that it’ll have problems – and the potential for some really nasty extensions, conservatories and the like to go up over the next few years.

With the work we’ll be doing, we’ve had an architect design it, and get things done for the requirements of both Planning and Building Regs. It’s not overly cheap – ut does mean that we should get permission a lot quicker than if we’d drawn the plans ourselves, made errors etc. The plans went through two revisions in order to get everything right- partly just where things hadn’t been understood the first time round, but also partly because as we were in the house more, we had other ideas about how things would work, or how they should be laid out.

It’s not been quick – we first spke to the architect back in February, and the plans were finally completed and submitted at the start of May. But as soon as the planning aplication had been made, it was in the system, the notice went up outside our place last Friday, and people have three weeks to object to our (very unintrusive) plans.

By comparison, though, our neighbour in the current house submitted his planning request back in January, and only got the acknowledgement of it at the end of April – and that’s when the notice went up outside his place. So while he’s drawn up his own plans and (I assume) made errors that have had to be rectified etc. before the process was completed, ours have gone in and been processed on the first try.

Of course, we still won’t have the go-ahead for a while yet. After the three-week period for objctions, they’ve still got to be approved, and (I think) go through the local council as well for approval. So I’d be surprised if we had anything confirmed fully much before the end of July.

Still, at least it’s all going through now, so we’re still making progress with things. Would it be quicker without having to go through the planning malarkey? Yes. Would we still have used an architect for the plans? Yes. But I can see that a lot of people wouldn’t bother, and would likely just hire a builder to come and do what they want. Which might work out, but I’d certainly have my reservations about it.