As usual the LA and private equity (Apse Capital in this case) are taking the ... mickey. The LA will spend 10 mins on this.

 

 

This was for Means of Enclosures - the plot already has a full set of hedges, fences etc and had these before we bought the plot. And Tree & Hedge Planting Scheme - as before with some fruit trees we planted before we got permission. A waste of everyone's time and resources.

Edited July 30, 20251 yr by Alan Ambrose

Ours had started charging £150 per emailed question To yes or no questions 

Count yourself lucky the fee is per application and not per condition.

 

The LPA still have to carry out consultations and the fee you pay nowhere near covers their fees in processing the application.

 

And… you could have challenged to remove said conditions if you felt the information had already been provided.

These are thieving (expletive deleted) for sure . But you do have to look at the bigger picture 

8 hours ago, nod said:

To yes or no questions 

That’s actually funny as my LPA would never answer yes or no as these are definite . So they would say “ you are factually not incorrect “ . If you queried is that a “ yes “ they just repeat in robot mode .

26 minutes ago, Pocster said:

That’s actually funny as my LPA would never answer yes or no as these are definite . So they would say “ you are factually not incorrect “ . If you queried is that a “ yes “ they just repeat in robot mode .

We paid to ask one question the online answer seemed quite ambiguous and they simply pasted and copied what we had already been reading online While we didn’t get a no We didn’t get a yes either 😁

My pet theory is that this and all the similar inefficiencies in our systems is where 'all the money has gone' i.e. it's not that there's any less money / resources, just that we're wasting it with all this nonsense.   

I'm still smarting over the £1000 council 'legal costs' for a 6 page "standard template" S106 agreement to confirm as self-builders we'd live in the property for at least 3-years.  

Edited July 30, 20251 yr by Benpointer

On 30/07/2025 at 09:37, Alan Ambrose said:

As usual the LA and private equity (Apse Capital in this case) are taking the ... mickey. The LA will spend 10 mins on this.

 

 

Yep.  Try and discharge directly with LPA and avoid the joke admin fee.

Ok in the round you can look at this in a few ways. 

 

But one is that the planning and building control function subsidises other public services. A BC officer told me that BC make a profit but that gets "hived off" to pay for other "stuff" that you may not have voted for at your last council election. 

 

To be fair, if you are going to pull folks trousers down you need to tell them what needs to happen to be able to pull the pants back up. But they don't even bother to tell you that. 

It makes me wonder, when folk will spend £5k on kitchen worktops.......£3k on a "lighting designer" (lol)......

 

Check yourself people, and pick your battles, please.....

Well I won't be doing either of those things - the thing that rankles is that the conditions were entirely unnecessary (there were a set of fences and hedges around the plot when we bought it and policing people's garden designs is so much BS for LPA's that claim they're under resourced) - so I view these as two more completely unnecessary, slow and expensive red tape hoops to jump over.

You could appeal the condition as unnecessary but that would probably cost more.