PP for outbuilding - Grade II listed cottage

[Simon]

Good morning Guys,

 

I spent some time over on the Foundations forum yesterday, and the help I received there was brilliant....so wondered if you might be able to do the same here?

 

We have a Grade II listed thatched cottage. It is 400 years old, and consequently, is quite....bijou, with no storage space at all (loft, cupboards, etc) when you've got as much paraphernalia as us, not to mention the professional dancer daughter, with a container load of dance costumes....anyway, I digress...

 

We knew the house wouldn't work for us in it's current state, so we came up with the plan for a Suffolk cartlodge, with storage room above, and asked the council HO their opinion BEFORE we bought it, wherein we were told, it just has to be 'in-keeping'.

 

Having bought the house, we drew up the plans, and took them once again to the council, this time the Senior PO said they all looked fine.

We submitted the plans, and NOW they come back and say we can't have that as it affects the listed houses 'dominance'...and that it must be single storey, with any storage in the roof area. They ignore next-doors cartlodge, admittedly single bay, but as tall as our cottage, and literally 3 metres away!

 

Now our proposed building, is away from the house, set at the rear of the plot, behind a tall hedge, and would be painted Sadolin black.

 

Roof-space storage is not only nowhere near large enough. I also have MS, and as my mobility decreases, I won't be able to access it anyway. So in many ways single storey works better from my perspective, but would leave an even larger footprint, which is why we discounted it before we started all this. 

 

There is much more to all this, but I sense you are losing the will to live, so will get to my question....

 

Are we better off getting them to write out the refusal, setting in stone their objections, or amending the original application, and facing months/years of continual goal post moving and ending up with a totally compromised building, that doesn't fulfil our need?

 

Many thanks for your time guys.

 

Simon

[Jeremy Harris]

You have two challenges, the listed building issue and the planning consent issue, and both are intertwined.  The primary one is that, because it is a listed building, anything constructed nearby has to be in keeping with the external view of the building and must not, in the view of the officer who looks after listed building conditions (often the Conservation Officer, rather than the Planning Officer) detract from the setting of the building.  We have a G II listed building opposite our plot, and the general rule here is that anything built within 100m of a listed building is subject to close scrutiny, and this meant I had to jump through a lot of hoops to gain PP, even though I was the other side of the lane from it.

 

Sadly, Conservation Officers can be a law unto themselves, and there is a very wide variability from one region to another on what they may agree to.  In theory, a Planning Officer can over rule a Conservations Officer's recommendation, but in practice this doesn't seem to happen very often (we were lucky, our Planning Officer did over rule one recommendation by the CO).

 

I think your best bet is to engage with the CO, and try to discuss what the concerns are over detracting from the setting of your listed building home.  They can be difficult to deal with, in my experience, but if you can get the CO to agree something, and make a recommendation to the Planning Officer, then it seems more likely that you will get PP.

 

I would withdraw your current application, to avoid getting a refusal on file.  You get a free re-submission, so use that after you have discussed things with the CO and got an idea of what his/her concerns are.

 

Finally, there is no such thing as precedent in planning, so there could be a monstrosity inches from your listed building, but that makes no difference at all to the way your application will be viewed.  It seems unfair, but that's the way the system works.

Edited June 18, 2017 by JSHarris

[Simon]

Thanks once again JS!

 

You should do this for a living and charge for your services!

 

We have tried the compromise route, but once the Heritage officer said it was too dominant, the planning officer (who two days before saw nothing wrong with it) will not be moved on the height of the building. 

 

Our parish council strongly supported us, but they were ignored (not unusual, according to them). We have tried suggesting to reduce the ridge height, we have given examples of other listed buildings in the area, which already have similar complementary structures (wish we'd bought one of them instead!), but the MidSuffolk PO are like the Terminator, they can't be reasoned with, they can't be bargained with....

 

We are happy with the lower building, but just know they are going to start on the footprint next, it seems they just want to be obstructive....I spoke to someone else with similar issues....4 drawings, and two years in, they still don't have agreement....

 

We just thought if we got them to put on record what they don't like with this building, if we attend to them and re-submit, they'l be in less of a position to refuse? 

[Jeremy Harris]

It's generally a bad thing to get a record of a refusal on file; we had several previous planning permission refusals for our plot and they were all read out, in detail, at the Parish Council meeting, plus all those who were asked to comment on the application were informed of the planning history, which is not a good thing.  Once there is a refusal on file, everyone reviewing any new application will do so with knowledge of this, and that means you're starting from a worse position.

 

Parish Councils are often ignored, as are a lot of the comments from local residents, often because the points raised aren't valid planning policy issues. 

 

If the Heritage Officer (substitute this for Conservation Officer in my last post - different areas have different names for the same job) has opposed the application, then the Planning Officer will usually just go along with this; it's one reason why getting advice from a Planning Officer before doing something like this is often fairly worthless, I'm sorry to say.

 

I think your best bet is to withdraw the application, and try to see if you can get the Heritage Officer to agree to modifications to the design.  This may well be a real struggle, as they start from the position that the only thing they will agree to is no change from the current setting. 

 

A good, local, planning consultant may well be able to help, too.  Often they know all the people involved and their personal likes and dislikes, and can manage to get things through that others can't.

 

 

Edited June 18, 2017 by JSHarris

[Simon]

Yes, you may have noticed in my posts yesterday, that we were thinking we might need to get a consultant on board....all this for essentially a timber 'non-permanent' structure...don't you just love planning offices!

We spoke to one already, and he was less than 'complementary' about MidSuffolks Heritage Team....

[Jeremy Harris]

I think it's a general principle that Heritage/Conservation Officers are a law unto themselves, difficult to deal with, often irrational and generally a PITA!

 

For light relief, this story involves our build.  Towards the end of the build, I was asked if I would give a continuing professional development session for some planning officers, building inspectors and the conservation officer.  The latter had opposed the fitting of solar panels built in to our roof, something the planning officer over ruled.  The first to arrive was the conservation officer.  His first comment to me was that he was so glad that he had insisted that we not be allowed to fit solar panels, as the house looked very nice in the local setting (it's very visible from the lane).  I suggested he go back outside and take a look again (we have 25 panels in the roof).  He came back in, saying that he hadn't noticed them, and had he known they would be so unobtrusive he would never have objected................

Edited June 18, 2017 by JSHarris

[ProDave]

30 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

I think it's a general principle that Heritage/Conservation Officers are a law unto themselves, difficult to deal with, often irrational and generally a PITA!

 

For light relief, this story involves our build.  Towards the end of the build, I was asked if I would give a continuing professional development session for some planning officers, building inspectors and the conservation officer.  The latter had opposed the fitting of solar panels built in to our roof, something the planning officer over ruled.  The first to arrive was the conservation officer.  His first comment to me was that he was so glad that he had insisted that we not be allowed to fit solar panels, as the house looked very nice in the local setting (it's very visible from the lane).  I suggested he go back outside and take a look again (we have 25 panels in the roof).  He came back in, saying that he hadn't noticed them, and had he known they would be so unobtrusive he would never have objected................

Some planning officers should not be in the job. When I was in the south I wanted to build a garage, which I described as "built of concrete blocks and rendered" The planning officer said to me "even if it's rendered it will still look like a prefabricated garage" and no amount of discussion could persuade here that it was masonry built of blocks and cement. It was refused, and won on appeal.

[Simon]

Says it all....I bet the HO that is telling us what we can or can't have hasn't actually been to our house, to assess it in person, just deciding what blocking reason they can use, from our plans and pictures, and Google streetview....

[Simon]

We had also considered the appeal option.....but it's another three months....with no guarantees, and we were quoted 2 grand for a specialist....money we are having trouble justifying, after the Heritage office have changed their mind over their original advice, saying pre-consultations never consider all the facts, so are often ignored...but they shut-up whan asked what is the point of them then!!

[ProDave]

An appeal needn't cost you anything.  I did my planning application for that garage myself, and the appeal myself.  The gist of the refusal was the garage was outside the established building line and closer to the road than the house was. There was a very good reason and that was we had an odd shaped plot with only a tiny "back garden" but lots of land to the side.  The local planners wanted me to put the garage in the small back garden area (where it might even have been permitted development) but that would leave me little usable garden, so I wanted it to the side to preserve my back garden.

 

The appeal inspector wrote what I thought was a very thorough evaluation of the pro's and con's and concluded that yes it was closer to the road than our house and the neighbours house,. but the other side of the lane was an old cottage fronting directly onto the road without even a footpath. The inspector concluded in light of that, our garage being a bit closer to the road was not out of keeping, and also provided a "beneficial sense of enclosure" to our garden.

[Mr Punter]

I am not sure if this applies to a listed building but it is possible to construct a number of outbuildings as permitted development, up to half the footprint of the house, giving you the storage you want.  If you later wanted to consolidate these the planners may  be amenable.  You need to be outside a conservation area for this to apply.

[Jeremy Harris]

6 minutes ago, Mr Punter said:

I am not sure if this applies to a listed building but it is possible to construct a number of outbuildings as permitted development, up to half the footprint of the house, giving you the storage you want.  If you later wanted to consolidate these the planners may  be amenable.  You need to be outside a conservation area for this to apply.

 

 

I'm pretty sure there's no PD for listed buildings, as my in-laws tried to put a small shed in their garden and had to get consent.  I'm not sure if this is universal, or something that was just local to West Sussex, though.

[Simon]

JS is right sadly....

 

We have to ask the Heritage Office (in our case some Twentysomething graduate that used to work for Boots, I kid you not!) to be allowed to do ANYTHING in, on, or round our own property....evn if we want to give it a fresh coat of Limewash....