The Margin of Error?

[Barney12]

One of the problems with a house built to passive house standard is that the walls are rather thick. In our case 530mm due to MBC's recommendation of a block skin on our exposed site. Add to that an incredibly strict planning policy on the park which unequivocally restricts the volume of our new dwelling to 15% of the one being demolished and we're faced with reducing our room sizes as the architect drew our plans with 350mm external walls and going back to a revised planning application is way off the cards, the first time round was hard enough!! Now 180mm per wall might not sound much but many of our rooms were already small!

 

Anyway chatting to an architect today (not the one I used) he said "well you've got your 150mm margin of error". He went on to explain that it was an industry standard acceptance that A3 planning drawings were accepted as not being final scale drawings and building was not always precise so that provided the building was no more than 150mm wider and longer then no planning department was likely to ever take action. 

 

I would be interested in other people's views / experience. Perhaps our new resident architect @Sensus has heard of this 150mm rule?? (Sorry to be so forward Sensus ;))

[Ferdinand]

I think there is error and there is error :-), and there are liberties and liberties, and not all are created equal.

 

For example, there was someone posting some time ago whose house was not quite where the Council expected it to be as they were measuring iirc from a boundary and the boundary line was unclear. I think that could be argued out as a genuine error / tolerance due to the General Boundary Rule, and that trees and fences can move.

 

But if your room suddenly turns out to be 1ft larger than expected inside because one wall has moved to the limit of tolerance one way the other has moved to the limit of tolerance the other way, I think that you will struggle to convince the Council that this is "error". It would not be credible because there would - should - be a dimension on your plan, and a credible mistake would be to move all of the walls in the same direction and keep it the same size.

 

I am sure there are always errors and mistakes you can 'not notice', but verisimilitude is important - it has to be a credible and consistent set of mistakes. In this case you would have been expected to have the overall size of your house being what it says on the plan. OTOH I have seen plans go through Councils with no dimensions on plans, or drawn to be possibly misleading in a way which will encourage the Council to say yes.  

 

I know a house which is extended to the boundaries on both sides, and I were I the Council would have been questioning. To me the application plan looks ambiguous as to where the boundaries are, so a rushed Planner may well have made an incorrect assumption in their haste. The corrugated roofed cottage Sensus quoted was a good example ... The Council missed that the material had not been specified, and seem at that time not to have insisted on samples which would have been a check. Even now I am sure that people get away without actually submitting samples, and just build it, then when considering enforcement the difference is such that they let it go.

 

And it may be that your mistake could be one of those that causes a real problem, and you may be made to put it expensively right.

 

Alternatively you can just go over the line and hope that no one notices, and that happens all the time. But if caught out, it is a fair cop.

 

Ferdinand

[TerryE]

Hummm, I think that a margin of error might be 50-75 mm but as Ferdinand says, I suspect that 180mm × 2 might cause the enforcement officer to gag.  The last think that you want is for fight a stop order. 

 

Can't you explore thinner alternatives?  Surely there are pretty good weather proof thin skins such as brick slips if the LPA doesn't require stone or the like.

 

In our case our wall is profile is ~50mm thicker than planned but we can point to factors: (i) the local stone that the LPA required us to use was a nominal 100mm but is more like 125 on average and we've cut them back to 150mm if larger and so need a 75mm gap rather than the nominal 50mm to keep a health separation between the stone skin and the timber frame.  And yes, we trimmed the sizes of our rooms when we decided to go for a twinwall rather than single wall timber frame. 

[Ferdinand]

ON your original example, I think that that could be made to go through, but if it was eg close to a boundary then pressure on the planners would make them enforce on it.

 

eg if you were close enough to my boundary that the 'error' was going to make it impossible for scaffolding to be put up on your plot in future without encroaching, I would make a significant fuss.

 

But I would need to act sharpish, because the probability of enforcement would reduce as the build progressed as the cost to remedy / consequences of error would change.

 

One of the purposes of consultants is to provide the knowledge as to which liberties can be taken in each context.

 

Ferdinand

 

Edited September 20, 2016 by Ferdinand

[Ferdinand]

Two further comments.

 

1 It was quite common for tracing paper to rip in two if taped onto a drawing board in too humid an atmosphere as the air dried.

 

2 The last paragraph of Sensus' post is what I call the HOG requirement. There is value in Hoary Old Gits who have been round the block.

 

Ferdinand

[IanR]

4 hours ago, Barney12 said:

Anyway chatting to an architect today (not the one I used) he said "well you've got your 150mm margin of error". He went on to explain that it was an industry standard acceptance that A3 planning drawings were accepted as not being final scale drawings and building was not always precise so that provided the building was no more than 150mm wider and longer then no planning department was likely to ever take action. 

 

You'd need to be careful with what you submitted for your drawings to the planning dept.

 

A correctly printed (from CAD) PDF that is electronically uploaded to the LPA will leave you nowhere to hide. PDFs have got too clever by half and the measuring facility within the free Acrobat Reader on every PC allows dimensions to be pulled off the plans to an accuracy of tenths of a millimeter.

 

If you wish to muddy the waters you will have needed to have submitted paper hard copies of the drawings or to at least have printed them on to paper and then scanned them to PDF to break the CAD-2-PDF accuracy.

[Ferdinand]

AS an alternative to print/scan, you could do a screen grab / paste and print that to PDFs.

 

Free tools are available for all of that.

 

Ferdinand

[Oz07]

I did a minor amendment or something called similar once. It was a cheap application and a quick decision. 

 

Had as the same problem as you so just submitted an app saying building 100mm larger all round due to increase in wall thickness to achieve better energy efficiency.  Stated that all internal volumes/ room sizes to remain the same. 

 

Just gave me peace of mind incase and smart arse surveyors got a tape out when I came to sell. 

[Barney12]

24 minutes ago, Oz07 said:

I did a minor amendment or something called similar once. It was a cheap application and a quick decision. 

 

Had as the same problem as you so just submitted an app saying building 100mm larger all round due to increase in wall thickness to achieve better energy efficiency.  Stated that all internal volumes/ room sizes to remain the same. 

 

Just gave me peace of mind incase and smart arse surveyors got a tape out when I came to sell. 

 

This was the original plan. Unfortunately the park in their infinite wisdom have pretty much abolished the non material amendment process. Even moving a window can result in a full plans re submission. I suspect this is to raise more funds and to give them more time now their team has reduced from what I beleive was once a team of 11 to just 4! National Parks have been subject to some of the biggest budget cuts since austerity and their admin functions are all but broken!

[Barney12]

Thanks for all the replies guys.

My A3 plans for which we were granted planning permission have absolutely no dimensions! 

Our plot is 1.2 acres surrounded on three sides by woodland, field and moorlandand. The house is in the middle of it so boundaries aren't too much of an issue.

[Barney12]

9 minutes ago, Sensus said:

As with all things Planning-related, one of the first questions you need to ask yourself is 'how likely are they to take enforcement against a breach?'. LPA's are not stupid (especially once the enforcement action is necessarily fed up the ladder to more senior staff, with more experience); enforcement is costly, time-consuming, and does their reputation no good at all. Unless significant and material harm is being done, they usually won't bother (unless, like one of my current clients, you've made a lifetime career out of deliberately provoking them!).

 

This is such a key point.

 

What is just so frustrating about our long journey to achieve planning is watching so many people just openly flouting the rules and with no consequence.

An "acquaintance" of ours has recently built a 20m x 12m shippon at his residential property to store his growing collection of garden machinery and a quad bike or two. He's in the park but like us cant be easily seen so just built it without even a thought to planning.

[ProDave]

I would have gone to planning with an over sized house, clearly stating that your aim is to make the habitable space inside 15% bigger, but to achieve that with passive house walls the external will be larger due to the extra wall thickness. And gone to appeal if refused.
 

[Ferdinand]

13 hours ago, Barney12 said:

Thanks for all the replies guys.

My A3 plans for which we were granted planning permission have absolutely no dimensions! 

Our plot is 1.2 acres surrounded on three sides by woodland, field and moorlandand. The house is in the middle of it so boundaries aren't too much of an issue.

 

If there is genuinely no record of size in the Council files (go through the Plannjng File next time you are there) then I might well chance my arm on a site like that by

 

a - creating a dimensioned version of the plan with sizes a little larger, for my files. If there is something buried somewhere that emerges if you have built the walls and plead ignorance enforcement us vanishingly unlikely.

 

or

 

b - treat the volume calculation as internal volume, unless there is some exact stipulation somewhere that says otherwise.

 

Or talk to them about extra insulation as suggested.

 

Ferdinand

Edited September 21, 2016 by Ferdinand

[Ferdinand]

Hmm.

 

Can you argue that you will have a right to add EWI to an extra 200mm in all dimensions in future to demonstrate that the Council controlling the size to that extent now is ludicrous?

 

ie you can build a Building Regs minimal house now with thinner walls and larger rooms and get to your better walls with large rooms by that other route, so to stop you doing it now is silly?

 

Or have I spent too much time with Planning Consultants?

Edited September 21, 2016 by Ferdinand

[Temp]

My A3 plans for which we were granted planning permission have absolutely no dimensions! 

 

That's possibly good news. If you try to push things I would round up dimensions to the nearest brick/block size rather than just adding an arbitrary 150mm. 

 

Usually there will be a scale rule somewhere on the drawing but that can also get stretched when drawings are photocopied. When you submit an application they want several copies and one is stamped "approved" and sent back to you. Depending on how the copies were made the one the planners keep can sometimes be slightly different to the one you have. It might be worth a trip to see the planning file at the council and making some careful measurements to see if your or their copy of the approved plans is slightly more favourable to you. As I recall photocopiers typically shrink a drawing by a few percent to ensure an A3 original always fits on an A3 copy.

[Barney12]

4 hours ago, Sensus said:

 

That is a perfectly good argument (provided permitted development rights have been left intact) in LPA's that accept non-material minor amendments.

 

But Barney's has made a couple of references to the strictness of Planning on 'the park'; does this mean that he is within a National Park, in which case the PD relaxation on external wall insulation effectively doesn't apply, anyway (as I understand the interpretation)?

 

I'm on a National Park. All PD rights were removed when they granted replacement of the dwelling. Its standard policy and they do it every time :(.

[Ferdinand]

8 hours ago, Sensus said:

 

That is a perfectly good argument (provided permitted development rights have been left intact) in LPA's that accept non-material minor amendments.

 

I'm told by our in-house Planner, who has extensive previous LPA experience, that one of the first things they are supposed to consider with a minor amendment within the Planning process is whether it would be PD after occupation (in which case, they really shouldn't bother resisting it, unless there are exceptional material impacts).

 

The slight problem in this instance, if I understand correctly, is that the LPA in question treats all minor amendments as material, so you have to go through the longer process of seeking approval for them, with its consequent costs and delays. I can understand the frustration with this, but to do so, using Ferdinand's argument if necessary, would at least give complete peace of mind.

 

But Barney's has made a couple of references to the strictness of Planning on 'the park'; does this mean that he is within a National Park, in which case the PD relaxation on external wall insulation effectively doesn't apply, anyway (as I understand the interpretation)?

 

Yes, but the wrong sort of planner would not like it :-).

 

There was an episode of The Avengers which is perhaps a good but unwelcome analogy to whichever side is on the receiving end.

 

They were put into a human version of one of those rat mazes with all the doors. A Planning battle can be about closing the correct doors first before the other person closes your doors.

 

When we did our Planning App the PC had a resemblance to one of those Barristers who enjoys winning the process battle. I have seen similar motivations in organisations specialising in Obtaining grants.

 

I don't know if anyone remembers the programme Garrow's Law about the Regency innovative Barrister. That caught the sense well. But then the client or the architect has to be the General.

 

Ferdinand

[mafaldina]

On 9/21/2016 at 00:16, Sensus said:

 

Yes there was a knack to this - you always taped your drawings by using a diagonal strip of tape at each corner, so that it could give a bit in both directions, and there was a sort of 'goldilocks' zone for masking tape stickiness... if you were good, you could balance the amount of stickiness against how hard you pressed the tape down when you applied it, so that the tape would always give first. And you re-taped your drawings regularly, to ensure that they remained taut enough for accuracy, but not so taut that they would tear.

 

... but yes, you'd get it wrong every now and then, and come back to a drawing with the corner torn off.

 

Then there was the trick of using a bag of 'pounce' (powdered chalk) to dab across the drawing to take out any greasiness transferred from your skin, which used to stop the ink adhering properly.

 

And you could tell a real pro by the fact that he didn't need a bit of masking tape on one edge of his razor blade, yet he still never cut himself.

 

All this is dying knowledge, that will be forgotten when the last of us old buffers from the pre-CAD era have shuffled off into retirement.

 

But then, the chap who taught me to draw had been brought up before tracing paper (they used to draw on coated linen), and used to get all wistful about the long-forgotten skills that he'd used as a lad!

 

That's why Kodatrace was invented and used from mid 70s, together with CS10 board. Takes me back, whatever happened to all those rapiedographs (remeber the ink lines on the back of you finger?).

 

[TerryE]

On our application, we documented house key dimensions, and I see that @Barney12 has omitted these.  A friend who is also a member of the forum told me that when he got his architects drawings (which had all dimensions detailed), he transcribed them removing all dimension info onto his own scale drawings (with the "do not scale from this drawing caveat") for submission in his application.  Sounds like a very sensible approach given this dialogue.

 

We had a spat with our LPA EO over the position of our slab -- it "had shifted 600mm towards our neighbours boundary" so they requested that we submit a minor-material amendment "document this change".  On checking, we realised that our neighbour had moved his corner fence post 0.5m into our garden behind our laurel hedge and that the slab was correctly positioned w.r.t. the adjacent highway to its front, so we declined.  They wouldn't admit any mistake, but they did eventually agree that "it would not be expeditious to proceed with the case" and closed it.  What pissed me off was that there were no measurements to the boundary given on the plan, and it was behind a 1.3m deep laurel hedge apart from one narrow gap where we had take a sycamore out some years before and where they took their measurements to come to this conclusion.

 

As to NMAs, the same EO asked us to put in an NMA because the front door didn't match the detailing in our application, so we agreed on this one -- also pointing out in our application that the front door wasn't visible from the public highway and the only reason that we had changed the style was that our window and door supplier (who was specified in a previous MMA to our application) had later informed us that this was the only style available in the range detailed in our application (and we had to use it because the attached side window had to match the others on the frontage and comply with our application).  The LPA then rejected the NMA and as the case officer subsequently clarified "any change to the principle elevation is material", and "it doesn't matter that the door isn't visible from the highway; callers to the house will see that style is not in keeping with a traditional cottage style". 

 

We've just had a second EO visit and the officer didn't even notice that we've still to change the door!  The whole process is crap, IMO.

Edited September 22, 2016 by TerryE

[Ferdinand]

My project layout designer used a CAD plugin to Fuzzy the lines to make it look hand drawn.

 

No longer available I think.

 

Gone to the useful programs trashcan in the sky along with Lotus Magellan and Gorilla.bas .

 

Old drawing boards should go to art or fashion students, who will use them.

 

Ferdinand

Edited September 23, 2016 by Ferdinand

[Barney12]

17 minutes ago, Ferdinand said:

My project layout designer used a CAD plugin to Fuzzy the lines to make it look hand drawn.

 

No longer available I think.

 

Gone to the useful programs trashcan in the sky along with Lotus Magellan and Gorilla.bas .

 

 

That function is still very much available in Sketchup.

[curlewhouse]

23 hours ago, Barney12 said:

 

I'm on a National Park. All PD rights were removed when they granted replacement of the dwelling. Its standard policy and they do it every time :(.

I'm a new build in a National Park and that wording seems  to have been missed on my PP - BUT, I know when early in the process I spoke to them about fitting solar panels at a later date (our orientation is really bad and we'd in effect need to have them on both sides of the roof, which is beyond our budget at this time) they sort of fudged the question as to whether I could do it as PD later or would have to apply for PP - the answer was sort of "you can do it as PD, but it would help if you added it to your planning application" - which is clearly contradictory and made me think it is still PD but they don't like the fact and still want to wield power over us proles who live in the park (they definitely seem to see their job as overseeing the occupants) .... could be wrong though. I've learned that whatever the question their answer at least where I am would be "no you can't do it" (or alternatively, yes, but only if you pay us and our agents lots of money)  unless you actually have researched beforehand and know your law in advance. Not the consultative relationship I'd hoped for.

Interestingly, when I talked to my architect about sizes and accuracy, he told me he has only ever had 2 houses actually measured by planners in his whole career. But here in the park I've no doubt they'll be out with a bloody micrometer! They were seen checking out a refurbishment/alteration build the other day while the owner wasn't there.

Edited September 23, 2016 by curlewhouse

[IanR]

6 hours ago, Sensus said:

you can always tell a CAD sketched layout because it is very rectilinear and doesn't 'flow' very well.

 

That's not fare to blame "CAD". Automotive uses CAD from concept sketches through to cutting press tools and can produce beautiful shapes without a straight line or right angle in sight.

 

The construction industry just chooses to limit itself to software optimised for modelling square boxes.

Edited September 23, 2016 by IanR

[Barney12]

2 hours ago, curlewhouse said:

I'm a new build in a National Park and that wording seems  to have been missed on my PP - BUT, I know when early in the process I spoke to them about fitting solar panels at a later date (our orientation is really bad and we'd in effect need to have them on both sides of the roof, which is beyond our budget at this time) they sort of fudged the question as to whether I could do it as PD later or would have to apply for PP - the answer was sort of "you can do it as PD, but it would help if you added it to your planning application" - which is clearly contradictory and made me think it is still PD but they don't like the fact and still want to wield power over us proles who live in the park (they definitely seem to see their job as overseeing the occupants) .... could be wrong though. I've learned that whatever the question their answer at least where I am would be "no you can't do it" (or alternatively, yes, but only if you pay us and our agents lots of money)  unless you actually have researched beforehand and know your law in advance. Not the consultative relationship I'd hoped for.

Interestingly, when I talked to my architect about sizes and accuracy, he told me he has only ever had 2 houses actually measured by planners in his whole career. But here in the park I've no doubt they'll be out with a bloody micrometer! They were seen checking out a refurbishment/alteration build the other day while the owner wasn't there.

 

I agree. The standard answer is to every question is "no" or "unlikely". Then when you've paid fee's to various people they then end up saying yes but almost always with conditions attached. I have deduced that this is down to being able to show a duty of care and that if anyone was ever to question a decision they can at the very least demonstrate a comprehensive audit trail.

 

BUT, I am also mindful that the "challenge" of building on a national park is exactly the reason that you have the environment you/we paid a premium for. It is difficult to criticize a system which you in effect benefit from. But equally it doesn't make it any less stressful!

[Stones]

1 hour ago, Barney12 said:

BUT, I am also mindful that the "challenge" of building on a national park is exactly the reason that you have the environment you/we paid a premium for. It is difficult to criticize a system which you in effect benefit from. But equally it doesn't make it any less stressful!

 

It's a very important point you've made.  The restrictions applied are there to protect the character and appearance of the area, and you've bought into that, presumably with full knowledge of what you were doing.  The same applies to Conservation Areas, and Listed Buildings. The restrictions may be frustrating, and yes there may be an argument that the restrictions are too tight, but a line has to be drawn somewhere.  Relax the rules too much and the area might lose that special character that makes it what it is.