Boat Plans Stitch And Glue | Office to residential – some interesting examples

Boat Plans Stitch And Glue

NOTE: There have been significant changes to the law since this blog post was published, and so the material printed below (including the appended comments) does not accurately reflect the current position. For completely up-to-date and fully comprehensive coverage of this subject, we would strongly recommend readers to obtain a copy of the author’s new book - ”A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO PERMITTED CHANGES OF USE” published by Bath Publishing in October 2015. You can order your copy by clicking on the link on the left-hand sidebar of this page.

There are interesting and encouraging signs that some LPAs are taking a positive and proactive approach to the new permitted development right allowing the conversion of offices to residential use. Furthermore, despite the doubts I expressed initially, it seems that there are no qualms about multiple conversions, involving the creation of a significant number of new flats within a single large office building.

I understand that Birmingham City Council has recently approved a 120-unit conversion in an office building in the city under the prior approval procedure introduced in May, rather than by means of an application for full planning permission. Other large schemes are in the pipeline around the country, but a few authorities are showing a degree of reluctance to accept such conversions, even for single units. As I have observed before, we shall have to await the outcome of a number of appeals before it becomes clear how the issues that arise from the drafting of the legislation are likely to be resolved.

It seems that the LPAs that are responding positively to these prior approval applications are fully prepared to accept that there is no opportunity to seek any element of affordable housing in such schemes and that the scope for securing other benefits from developers is limited. If there are any LPAs that don’t accept this, they may find out the hard way, through the appeals process, what the true limits of their powers are under the new prior approval procedure.

© MARTIN H GOODALL


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Boat Plans Wood | We’re all going to be film stars!

Boat Plans Wood

Not to be outdone by the forthcoming second series of ‘The Planners’ on the telly (which, by the way, is going to be re-titled “Not in My Back Yard!”), Uncle Eric has decided that the cameras should be allowed into planning committee meetings and planning hearings and inquiries.

New guidance is to be issued by De-CLoG, which "will make clear the rights for members of the press and public, including local bloggers and hyper-local [?] journalists, to report, film and tweet planning appeal hearings." In a press release, De-CLoG ministers express the hope that “this will open up a previously mysterious and rarely seen side of the planning process”.

The new freedom to record and film proceedings, including the use of digital and social media can be exercised in future in appeal hearings and inquiries, provided that it does not disrupt proceedings. According to the blurb, "Inspectors will advise people present at the start of the event that the proceedings may be recorded and/or filmed, and that anyone using social media during or after the end of the proceedings should do so responsibly."

Pickles is particularly annoyed, because previous guidance he published in June, which was intended to open up planning committee meetings in the same way, has been deliberately ignored by some councils. Unfortunately, he omitted to write this into recent changes to subordinate legislation on the conduct of council meetings, and so he can do no more for the time being other than to huff and puff about it (something Uncle Eric is rather good at doing).

The press release ‘names and shames’ several of the offending councils:

• Wirral Council banned a blogger from filming its planning committee on health and safety grounds, asserting the ban was necessary as they cannot ‘police’ people filming.

• Tower Hamlets stopped a 71 year old resident and OAP campaigner filming a council meeting in June 2013. Council officers asserted that allowing filming could lead to “reputational damage to the authority”

• Keighley Town Council stopped a council meeting when a group of pensioners started to film the meeting and called in the police who escorted the 11 residents from the town hall. Officials argued allowing filming would be a “breach of Standing Orders”

• Blogger Richard Taylor, producing a guide for citizens on how to film meetings, has warned that some councils have demanded identity papers, such as a passport, before allowing filming, and warned “be prepared for the police to be called and the possibility of arrest, especially if you intend to film, photograph, tweet or take notes on a laptop” (Apparently, he was threatened with arrest when he tried to film Huntingdon District Council.)

• Bexley Council has asserted it intends to continue to prohibit audio and visual filming due to its “agreed protocol”

• Stamford Town Council meeting has reaffirmed its ban on a newspaper reporter tweeting from a council meeting, due to “concerns about 140 character snippets of information not accurately portraying a debate”

I have no more sympathy than Pickles with these weak excuses. If meetings are open to the public (as most planning committee meetings must be by law), there can be no reasonable objection to the proceedings being filmed, photographed and recorded, or reported ‘live’ on social media.

On the other hand, if you have attended as many different planning committee meetings as I have, you may well understand the reluctance of elected members to have their ‘deliberations’ broadcast to the great unwashed. The sad fact is that the standard of debate in many planning committees is absolutely dire, and the poor calibre of elected members, their profound ignorance of planning principles and procedures, and general lack of common sense is appallingly obvious. When officers in one authority claimed that allowing filming could lead to “reputational damage to the authority”, their fears may well have been justified!

As for opening up planning inquiries and hearings to the cameras, camera phones and recorders, I rather suspect that interest in recording the proceedings in this way will rapidly wane. It is rare even to see a local print journalist at an appeal hearing or inquiry, and those members of the public who bother to attend mostly drift away by lunchtime on the first day. The plain fact is that for those not directly involved in the process, it is arcane and incomprehensible, and opening it up to the cameras is not going to change that.

Major public inquiries into controversial development proposals might attract the TV cameras, but they will have the same problem as print journalists who have tried to cover these proceedings in the past. The bigger the development scheme, the longer the inquiry, and for journalists and TV crews it is likely to prove as exciting as watching paint dry.

Still, it makes a good silly season story, and Uncle Eric can feel satisfied that he has taken yet another decisive step to improve the planning system. Never mind, that we are still not building more than a tiny proportion of the new homes that are so urgently needed. Never mind that local planning authorities are starved of funds and can hardly cope with their work as a result. And never mind that all Uncle Eric’s previous brave words and stirring deeds have done virtually nothing to make any really significant change to the planning system.
______________

UPDATE (30 August 2013): I am told that Merton Council has begun webcasting various meetings within the past few months, including its Planning Applications Committee (although I am told that after two meetings no further webcasts have been made due to "technical difficulties"). A correspondent has suggested that readers should watch the first three applications presented on 18 April.

The webcasts can be accessed on:

http://www.merton.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcasts

This is not a link, but if you copy and paste this URL into the address line on your browser, the page should open. Don’t panic when you get no sound at the beginning. The camera was switched on before the meeting began, and the sound only starts when the Chairman opens the meeting, 7½ minutes into the recording. (You can move the cursor along to get to this point without having to watch usual the pre-meeting comings and goings in total silence. Alternatively, the menu on the right of the page enables you to go straight to the start of each item. The first application is reached about 10¾ minutes ibnto the recording.)

The 18 April meeting seems fairly typical to me. One thing you’ll notice is that the proceedings might reasonably be described as ‘unhurried’. It takes over 20 minutes, including the planning officer’s introduction, and public statements, before the members of the committee start to discuss the first application around 33½ minutes into the recording.

Anyway, see what you make of it.


© MARTIN H GOODALL


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Boat Plans And Patterns | Yet more interesting times

Boat Plans And Patterns

You may have noticed that blog posts have been a bit thin on the ground recently, due to the continuing pressure of work. Unfortunately, it does not look as though I am going to be able to find the time to write anything further here for at least the next 10 days.

This is rather frustrating, as there has been an awful lot going on recently, which is just begging to be written up here. Among the many recent innovations, the Planning Inspectorate has published a new Procedural Guide to Planning Appeals and Called-in Planning Applications, and the government has announced a faster planning appeals process, leading (it is hoped) to earlier decisions. This will involve ‘front-loading’ the appeals process, including a requirement to submit a full appeal statement with the appeal form, which will make a lot more work for appellants at the outset of the appeal process. The new rules will apply to appeals in respect of applications determined after 1 October, but I shall have to defer discussing these and other innovations to a subsequent post.

Meanwhile, new regulations have been published for applications under section 62A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (introduced by Section 1 of the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013). This is the provision that enables certain applications to be made direct to the Secretary of State, bypassing the local planning authority.

Three new statutory instruments have been made relating to conservation areas and demolition, which I have not had time to look at yet. These, too, come into effect on 1 October.

In addition to this, we have also had the new web-based planning advice that is set to replace all the old familiar circulars. I confess that at a first glance, I was not impressed, but this too is a topic to which we shall return.

As I mentioned in passing a few weeks back, further changes to planning fees have been introduced by The Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2013 (SI 2013/2153) (2013 Regulations). Yet again, 1 October is the date when these come into force.

Then, of course, there are Chris Grayling’s proposals for further changes to judicial review. I haven’t had time to look at these in any detail yet, but they include the idea of a special planning court, which could be a welcome innovation. But this will depend on how it is implemented. It is a subject to which I will return in due course.

Uncle Eric has not been idle himself, and on 2 September he was boasting to the House of Commons how very busy De-CLoG has been during the summer, when everyone else was away with their buckets and spades. This has included a report on the future of our high streets. (They haven’t got a future, basically.) He also touched on the plans to extend permitted development rights, previously discussed in this blog, and new guidance published on 28 August calling for councils to deliver more town centre parking spaces, to tackle street clutter and to get rid of ‘sleeping policemen’ (road humps). He also wants to encourage residents to rent out parking spaces in their front gardens. (This had already caused apoplexy among some planning officers.)

Uncle Eric also drew attention to powers introduced by the Localism Act 2011 for the listing of assets of community value, including local pubs, to prevent their sale and redevelopment. And then, of course, there was Uncle Eric’s wheelie bin crusade. And so on, and so on.

So, there will be an awful lot of material for planning professionals to digest in the near future, and a lot of changes that are going to happen on 1 October.

One thing Uncle Eric said made me laugh. He reckons that, with these various changes and the ‘simplification’ of ministerial planning advice, there is going to be little or no work left for planning lawyers to do. I think we may find that as result of some of these changes there will be more work for us than ever!

© MARTIN H GOODALL


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Boat Plans Pdf | Labour’s planning policy

Boat Plans Pdf

Two speeches at this week’s Labour Party conference gave an indication (albeit somewhat vague and lacking in any detail) as to the possible thrust of Labour’s planning policy if they regain power at the 2015 General Election.

Hilary Benn promised that “Labour will get Britain building again.” He frankly acknowledged that we are just not building enough homes, but pointed out that in the last few years, the profits of the big housebuilders have nevertheless soared. Land, he said, is too expensive. Too often developers hang on to it hoping for the price to rise.

Benn rather piously expressed the view that we can’t carry on saying on the one hand “Where are the homes for the next generation?” and on the other “Please don’t build them near me”. But he failed to give any clue as to how NIMBYism might be overcome. In fact he seemed to be going in the opposite direction when he opined that we will not get more homes by top-down targets. Councils and communities, he said, must take that responsibility “but they need more power to be able to do so.” I am bound to say that this does sound to me like typically meaningless political claptrap.

Benn’s approach seems to be based on the assumption that communities actually want house-builders to build homes on the land they own, or over which they hold options. But in all too many places the NIMBYs want no such thing, and they are only too happy that land-banked sites should remain undeveloped. So proposing that developers must register their land banks (including optioned sites) so that “communities should be able to do something about it” is just pie-in-the-sky.

It is difficult to see what would be achieved by requiring developers to implement their existing planning permissions or face (as yet unspecified) financial penalties in respect of unimplemented planning permissions. Benn went on to suggest that if developers, despite being charged some sort of ‘non-development’ tax or penalty, still don’t build on their land, a Labour government “will sell the land on to someone else who will”. Frankly, any politician who thinks that such a mechanism could be made to work or that it would actually have any practical effect in getting homes built is away with the fairies.

Another proposal canvassed by Benn is that where there is insufficient land available for housebuilding within a particular LPA area, that LPA should be given a new ‘Right to Grow’, allowing them, if they wish, to appropriate land for house-building within neighbouring councils’ areas. There would be a requirement for those neighbouring LPAs to work together to achieve this. It sounds like the current ‘duty to co-operate’ but with much sharper teeth. How it would work in practice is anyone’s guess.

Finally, Benn proposed that we should build new communities – new towns and new garden cities. He held up the example of the Attlee Government in this regard, but studiously ignored an abortive initiative by the most recent Labour government to do something similar. A Labour government, he said, will make sure that local authorities get the powers and the incentives they need to acquire land, put in the infrastructure and build new towns. It seems, however, that Benn is expecting the initiative to come from the local authorities, rather than from central government. Funding wasn’t mentioned.

In his leader’s speech, Ed Miliband took up the same themes. In 2010 when the last Labour government left office there was a shortage of one million homes in Britain. If we carry on as we are, by 2020 there will be a shortage throughout the country of two million homes (equivalent in size to two cities the size of Birmingham). So he too said “we’ve got to do something about it”, and repeated what Hilary Benn had said earlier, adding that a Labour government will have a clear aim that by the end of the next parliament (in 2020) Britain will be building 200,000 homes a year, more than at any time in a generation (but still not by any means as many as in the days when Harold Macmillan was the Housing Minister).

The housing crisis to which Mr Millibean referred is of long standing, and was increasingly apparent throughout the 13 years of the last Labour government. This is not intended to be a party political point (and I am certainly no Tory), but the plain fact is that the last Labour government did nothing effective to tackle what was already recognised at the time as a real crisis. This does engender some scepticism as to the ability or willingness of the next Labour government to tackle this issue effectively in view of their failure to address the problem between 1997 and 2010.

What Miliband and Benn were proposing in their party conference is unlikely to make any practical difference to the housing situation in this country. The major problem is a lack of affordable housing, and in particular social housing. 25 years of council house sales have depleted local authority housing stock, and HM Treasury has resolutely resisted the re-investment of the proceeds in new council house building.

The attempt by successive governments, both Tory and Labour, to use or, in reality, to abuse the planning system (entirely without any legislative authority) to produce an element of affordable housing has been an abject failure, and has not produced more than a tiny proportion of the affordable housing that is actually needed. In all too many cases it has simply made proposed housing developments unviable, so that no houses get built at all on some sites unless the affordable housing obligation can be renegotiated. The only reason for this policy being pursued is an almost paranoid fear in government, even within the last Labour government, of funding social housing from general taxation, involving extra government borrowing and an increase in the PSBR. But if we are not prepared to do this, then no other mechanism is going to produce the social housing that is so badly needed.

Tinkering with the private housing market (which is all that was being proposed at the Labour Party conference) will do nothing to resolve the crisis. At worst, the present government’s ‘help-to-buy’ scheme will simply produce another house price bubble in the private sector without in any way tackling the underlying problem. Labour will clearly eschew that approach, but their suggested nostrums are unlikely to be any more effective in solving the housing crisis.

In the post-war period, continuing into the 1950s and 1960s, governments of both political colours recognised the need for substantial public house-building programmes, and funded them from general taxation. Until a future government is prepared to do likewise, the housing crisis will only get worse.

© MARTIN H GOODALL


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