Planning Your Time Properly?

How long are you expecting to wait for planning approval?

The answer will often depend on which local authority you live in, or who is the planning officer allocated to your development or home renovation project!

This can be a postcode lottery, but the ticket price is significantly higher! 

If you live in Carlisle, The City of London or Halton, which I had never heard of but is in Cheshire, you are going to have a much better chance of getting your planning approval first time with 97% of all applications approved, I would really like to understand why that is the case and what other authorities can do to improve their % approval.

Imagine living in Harrow and wanting to extend your home or develop a piece of land, only 64% of planning applications get approval, they have the lowest average approval rate in England!

On average, 13% of applications are rejected, so 86% get approval, there is a lot of talk about NIMBYs in the UK, but the statistics would suggest we have far more YIMBYs which is YES in my back yard, of course unless you are in Harrow.

We need more homes but get more red tape!!

If you take a look at some of the details behind the headline numbers, the real impact is faced by the larger applicants with developments of over 10 homes getting the most refusals and primarily in London and the South East and East of England, refusing 1 in 2 applicants. This is an expensive and lengthy process for the larger developers, and planning for a 50% chance of a no must take some grit.

If you take a quick look at the population growth forecasts for the next 10 years, by 2036, there will be another 6.6 million in the country, meaning we are going to have to build an average of 382,000 homes a year and we are currently only achieving 240,000 (2022-23) annually in England. 

So called NIMBYS aren't the main issue with achieving planning

Planning plays such a critical part in the process, and with departments heavily under-resourced and a vacuum of communication in most cases when an application is rejected, developers, architects and homeowners can remain frustrated and financially out of pocket.

Even simple schemes have many layers of complexity

On average, it takes about 3 months to get a planning application through the system and we need to encourage more developers to the table with projects that will yet a Yes!