Daniel H

Huge news - great work.

@flanagaj - I would make sure your architect puts your responses on the portal to ensure it's there and doesn't drop off the side. And sometimes a proposal will be pulled into the committee if there are a minimum number of comments that go against the judgement of the planning officer.

Just to update you on the latest. Everything up on the Portal now and delighted that the Parish Council supported our application. First comment too! So the work we did to introduce ourselves and address their concerns certainly paid off. We have reached out to people we know locally with an ask to support (assuming there will be a comparable campaign on the objection side!) and will see how that goes. Will update... Assuming we go to planning committee middle of March. Something to get our heads round.

Given there are issues in the objectors' emails that you can argue against I suggest you or your architect do a sweep of them and upload your own comments as a response to them. I wouldn't want misinformation to land with the planning officers. Don't give up on some supportive comments - do you know anyone nearby who you can ask politely? And you can often find past planning meetings online - our LPA posts everything on YouTube - so getting a flavour might be possible at home. But agree - turning up and pressing the flesh feels like the right thing. Suggest emailing the members of the committee ahead of the meeting with a summary of the proposal. I understand that presenting to the committee yourself is the done thing, but make sure your planning consultant is on the drafting team! The policy should be dealt with by the planning officer, and I think some human story goes a long way in these places. I also think your planning officer wants to pass the scheme, so do what they say and be seen to do so, and I think that will help a lot. (fyi, our scheme is in with the planners now and we're expecting to go to the planning committee in March)

Thanks @G and J - I'm in two minds. Partly I'd like to try to let things go under the radar, but you are right: people will spot the sign and talk about it! Mainly the people we know are the very local folk. We also did think we'd put a card and an explainer into all the local homes. I think people might like that. And @TerryE - We'll certainly get some objections and that's, I think, par for the course. I have tried to anticipate these and just make sure there's a robust defence or report where needed. We've tried to be quite clear where the proposal is an improvement on the existing planning permission and accentuate the positive!

Thanks for your advice! @Marvin - we've covered as many of these points as we possibly could. I agree most people won't engage, although we have met a lot of very nice folk whom I'm not above begging to say something nice! @ToughButterCup - the new search functionality helps on the Planning Portal enormously. We have a sense of the Planning Officer and his approach (plus he did our pre-app!) so the slightly thin ice is flagged already. My hope is to show the neighbours are keen on these aspects and if it's just his subjective opinion, that other equally subjective opinions express the other view. Appreciate your engagement very much. The application is up there on the Portal and just waiting for the documents to go live before the lovebombing starts!

Hi folks! We have finally submitted our planning application - big news! We've been lucky enough to meet some really wonderful neighbours and I'd like to ask for their support of our application. I can find plenty of content on the best ways to object to planning applications, but are there 'material' reasons for support? I'd like to offer a set of reasons to people so they have something significant to say. Or is it more a case that any comments in support are good on the basis that they're so rare in the first place? Advice gratefully received!

If you already have a report they usually say they last 2 years so you might not need a new one. And if you don't get the right reports or it looks like you're not playing the game, the LPA Conservation Officer will start digging more, I suspect. But do shop around. Also this is a bad time of year for this kind of report as things start to hibernate so you might need to hold off til May, or ask for it to be a planning condition that you get a report in the season. There are costs and you will need to pay them, I'm afraid - key question is how much.

If you want a 😬story, you're welcome to our list. Some background: we're in a Conservation Area in a National Park with a Listed Building nearby. Planning on the hardest setting. There's a derelict building on site which we'd like to remove and put up a two-storey detached building. There is a lovely old house ("non-listed heritage asset") immediately to the north (so we have an impact on their light). Ready? Planning Consultant £3000 - the National Park has a LOT of policies and they love rejecting applications as far as we can see and we will automatically be referred to the Planning Committee and probably go to appeal so we thought it best to invest early - if going to appeal, inspectors can only go on what was submitted in the planning application, so we wanted to ensure we were properly ready for that. Heritage Consultant £3500 - the number one reason we'll get refused is on heritage grounds, so we are opting for a very tight argument here and I see this as money well spent. Ecologist £1575 - I think we were scheduling this at the busiest time of year so paid more than perhaps we would have if we had planned it in earlier. Who required a... Bat survey £1300 - as above, but we did shop around for this. Daylighting Assessment £1700 - we assume the neighbours will object on daylight grounds so we have opted to do all the calculations up front (we got a 50% discount on this). Ground Investigation £3175 - we're on a hill and we know there will be questions around party walls etc. Hope to make this back in appropriately-engineered foundations! So yeah, it's been eye watering to get this far. Don't forget to add VAT! It's a labour of love and while we might not get PP, we're doing everything we can to tip the scales in our favour. I know there will be plenty of folks here who are in an easier planning context and for that reason probably can do a lot themselves, but we're not in that fortunate position and so some professional help was needed. Hoping to apply for PP this side of Christmas. Will report back.

The event went really well. We had a lot of positive feedback and some clear next steps. Thanks for the advice and support. I think your idea of a community impact assessment is good @Bozza - we'll use that as a way in to the Parish Council when we see them in December. There's some issue with uploading the jpgs of the consultation boards, so I am going to have to leave it this time and figure out a way to do it when I have a second.

Wow, @Ferdinand - that's so funny. I had no idea. I mean, sure I know it's steep (the rock climbing is at the top!) but not world-record steep! @Bozza - really appreciate your thoughts. It will be so helpful to hear about any issues (we already learned there is a sewage pipe under the site 🙃) and love the idea of carefully and gently asking for risks so that we can mitigate them. We already had a good one on craned deliveries during school drop off and pick up time.

Thanks @Ferdinand - it's in Bamford, so the Hope Silver Band idea is super. We're on The Green, and it's directly in front of the Well Dressing, so people will definitely know it - it's very prominent (another planning challenge!) The site has extant Planning Permission which is the 'fallback option' so we've tried to have a principle of always improving on that design (which isn't hard - it's horrible!) but in terms of daylighting to the neighbours etc. You're right on the 'promise' - I have tried really hard not to! Will feed back after Friday!

Thanks for these thoughts so far. We also reckon relationships are important so have been a few times, tried to tidy up the site a bit, and generally started to introduce ourselves. I have been in touch with a few neighbours over the last few months too. You're right about being interested in them as people - we're moving into a community and I'm excited to get to know people and become part of life. I have a spreadsheet of names and addresses, and key bits of info people have shared with us. Most people are so happy the eyesore will be dealt with that we've had a lot of enthusiasm - albeit not with any sight of the proposed designs yet. And I reckon we'll have a few people who are upset, and that's life. I'm more worried about the tough Planning Department (and we can have a whole new conversation about that in due course!) In that context, your idea @G and J is super - we will definitely get ahead of the planning process and do a letter drop round the area. Hopefully it will encourage positive representation. There are some lovely boards we have made, so I will post them up when the event has happened - plus they're a big file and the forum won't allow me to upload them as they are now. You will get your voyeuristic fix soon enough, @Iceverge!

Hi all We're building on a derelict site in the centre of a beautiful Peak District village. Despite our belief that we're designing sensitively, we are very aware that we're Londoners coming up and disturbing the peace. In a spirit of openness and neighbourliness we've booked the village pub on Friday evening, produced some information boards and even made a scale model of the part of the village the build is in. There's a QR code people can use to offer some feedback in a an online form. Just wondering if there's any wisdom on the forum about this kind of event, any dos and don'ts, watchouts or top tips. We're keen to put this into the D&A statement, surface any concerns that we can address in the design or planning docs, and even try to get Parish Council support for the design. But it will be easy to put our foot in it, so keen it goes well. Any thoughts appreciated! Thank you!

Just in case it's helpful - as this conversation seems to have petered out a bit, our experience was that we knew we needed a ground Investigation for any future engagement with a Structural Engineer, and also for the water connection pipe selection (local water company stipulated on their website) and that the LPA might have some questions as would our neighbours who are uphill on two sides from us. I sourced 10 companies and heard back from a fair few then rang around and had conversations with 3 and went with one who knew the self-build context and he helped a lot in terms of the brief. We might have overpaid (it was not cheap) but I felt super confident with him, and we have as far as I can tell everything we need. In the absence of a SE already (we are not yet at that stage) I wanted a GI so this seemed to be a good way to do it. We asked a SE friend to check the brief for us. I totally get it if you have a SE and they can offer to detail a brief for you - would probably mean you only commission what you need. Anyway, my experience in case it's helpful!