More agricultural buildings!

Extremely pleased to have secured full planning permission for a substantial agricultural building within the Gloucester Green Belt for a local company engaged in the breeding and sale of bee nuclei.

The applicant’s previous consultant had informed them that as they were seeking to erect an agricultural building they could simply erect the building under Permitted Development Rights… Job done.

While it may be that Sch2 Pt 6 of GPDO permits buildings for agriculture in principle, there’s often a little bit more to agricultural planning than that, and unfortunately in this instance the previous consultant failed out of the gate when they didn’t notice a commercial airport over the hedge (which knocked out PD).

Working closely with the applicant, Wreyland submitted an application which first justified that Honey Bees are ‘creatures kept for the production of food’ and therefore constitute livestock. They are quantifiable, they have value, their environments and welfare are carefully managed by their keepers to produce a commodity for sale. These principles are exactly the same as say a farmer keeping dairy cattle for the sale of their milk, or breeding beef cattle from suckler cows or lamb from breeding ewes.

Next we justified the use and scale of the building (being for the sale of nuclei, the packaging and preparation for sale of bee products, the maintenance of hives, the extraction of honey for bulk-sale etc) in the context particularly of The Late Mr Millington (a personal hero of mine) and his sterling work back in the 90’s at Wroxeter and that while certain uses may be considered non-agricultural in isolation, when undertaken for purposes ancillary to a normal farming activity, they too can be considered reasonably necessary for the purposes of agriculture.

Supporting the case further with PINS evidence, Tewkesbury allowed the building without too much further interrogation under delegated powers.

Plans and design were provided by the ever reliable Charles Board, with ecology provided by Anton Kattan at Pure Ecology and arboricultural input to mitigate against risk to a belt of attractive TPO covered trees was provided by Phil Dye and Wotton Tree Consultancy.

Consequently the applicants now have a new, dedicated premises in which to expand their growing business and to give it a permanent base into the future.

Followers of Wreyland Rural Planning will by now be bored to tears by my growing obsession with rural economic development, but it is quite important, and something that I feel is often still not clearly understood or even taken seriously by Local Authorities, so it was positive to see in this instance the LPA taking the time to understand the applicant’s proposals and for the correct result to be delivered.

I wish the applicants well and every success as they take their business to the next level.