Square Feat

Congrats - I can't think that contingent agreements are easy to negotiate.

 

Any chance of having to go to appeal? Re which step, it may depend on whether you think your LPA will want to engage in a time consuming horse trade. Also, whether you'll be happy with just outline.

It is indeed beautiful!

 

We also missed step 2 (England) although we were careful to include as much detail of what we wanted in 1., with a statement "we expect to fine tune materials etc" and listened to their feedback for step 3. Application.

 

Worked for us. Good luck

Well that was fairly quick once you tracked them down.  That looks a great location.  Is it isolated?

9 minutes ago, Mr Punter said:

Well that was fairly quick once you tracked them down.  That looks a great location.  Is it isolated?

Yes and no. It's in a small group of houses, (many self-built) on the edge of a village with a hall that hosts community gatherings. It's 6 miles from a small town (4k people) with a co-op, doctors and a few shops.  It's 17 miles or half an hour from a much bigger town with 4 supermarkets, 3 builder's merchants and a Screwfix.

24 minutes ago, Alan Ambrose said:

Congrats - I can't think that contingent agreements are easy to negotiate.

 

Any chance of having to go to appeal? Re which step, it may depend on whether you think your LPA will want to engage in a time consuming horse trade. Also, whether you'll be happy with just outline.

No, it has to be full planning. Ecology insist on that for the plot mortgage. I'm not expecting it to be knocked back completely as the site qualifies as brownfield I believe, but I might have to compromise on what I want in order to get it through. We shall see.

@Square Feet congratulations - what a cracking view! I do hope it all goes well for you in the planning process. A small ‘admin’ tip I would recommend starting as early as possible is to log all your activity and communications. As much as this sounds tedious (which it is), I did ours a bit later in the day, back-dating it with all my emails in the many months of ‘quiet time’ (unresponsive council and sometimes paid professionals on my side).

 

The reason for this was that much later, it became *exceptionally* useful when the council suddenly changed their mind and ultimately refused our first application. This log of activity allowed my planning consultant to easily and quickly reference the specific communications that were relevant (in our case the many broken promises of when a response or decision would be made) and we managed to weave it in to an element of our appeal. My point being that if you populates it as you go from the start it is sooooo much easier.

 

Here’s a screenshot of the format I used (3rd column is ‘Interaction with Council’ - I added later when this became an issue and just put an ‘x’ in so I could filter to compile a shorter extract).

 

Columns:

A - numbered rows (in the table) for ease of reference in emails

B - Month

C - Date 

D - Interaction with Council

E - Event

F - Days Passed; Formula: =[@Date]-C$6

G - Weeks since; Formula: =([@Date]-C$6)/7

 

The splurg of black is just redaction of names / addresses. Rather than share a blank template I thought it would give an idea of how little / much I entered in the summary. Some emails I included an extracted quote if particularly relevant e.g. “I’m minded to recommend for approval”, before then refusing many months later.

 

In this particular extract, the gap between the yellow highlighted lines showed the application being registered on 14 Oct, followed by zero responses from the assigned Planning Officer (PO), before an automated email reply on 8 Dec saying he was leaving the council. I really do hope the Scottish behaviours are better than ours!

 

Best of luck.