Beware the Planning Officer in the Sun…

“If you don’t know who the best Rural Planning Consultant is, it probably isn’t you…” Or was that fighter pilots?

You may remember, some years ago, a gentleman bought an isolated farmstead for a bit of peace and quiet, only to find that the RAF used it as a target for training (the house having been empty for a number of years). Jets would fly over the place day and night, waves of Hercules would fly past at a level lower than ​the house. It was becoming a bit of an issue.
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To solve the problem, the owner painted a sign on top of his shed which invited passing fast-jet pilots to perhaps consider using alternative training areas, as identified on the shed on the right hand side of the image…
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Sadly, I am not a fighter pilot… Grandad was, but it’s no longer 1930 and the RAF apparently now looks for slightly more in its candidates than being a “first class, left-handed spin-bowler” which was how he got in

I do however know a ‘Target Rich Environment’ when I see one. (Honestly, I’m going somewhere with this I promise…), so let’s pull the ejector handle, fire through the canopy and float gently down into the farmyard where we meet our bleeding-eared client who has invited us, in between being strafed, to think about some planning opportunities on his old stone barns on the left-hand side of the image…

Once we’ve established over a cup of tea that a planning application for an anti-aircraft battery would probably just upset the Parish Council, we might consider residential use, and specifically in this instance opportunities under ‘Class Q’ or to give it its long form, The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, Schedule 2, Part3 (changes of use), Class Q… (Try saying while delivering Barnes-Wallis’s regards to the Ruhr Valley…).

Boiled down, this means that planning permission has already been granted for an agricultural building to be converted to a house, which can then be sold on the open market, or let out as either a long-term tenancy or for holiday use to serve as a diversified income stream, but its application will be subject to Prior Approval by the Local Authority.

During the Second World War, RAF pilots blamed ‘Gremlins’ for inexplicable accidents. They were considered “tricksters, acting out their mischief for their own self-interest.” What a lot of people don’t know is that, at the cessation of hostilities, these Gremlins moved on from inconveniencing fighter pilots, to scuppering innocent members of the public when trying to get planning permission…

Development under Class Q certainly hasn’t escaped the Gremlin’s insidious influence and is subject to a number of qualifications ready to catch out the un-wary. The list is extensive, open to interpretation and includes (inter alia), transport and highways, noise, contamination risk, flood risk, design and external appearance, and whether the location or siting is ‘impractical or undesirable’… If you’ve got a couple of hours, a bottle of Whisky and a cold flannel, you can fully gen-up at The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015 (legislation.gov.uk).

More recently the Government has provided further interpretation in their National Planning Practice Guidance which offers all the comfort of a lurking U-Boat, with a particularly mischievous and not-at-all-open-to-interpretation item being guidance on the need referenced above for Local Authorities to consider whether a development may be Impractical or Undesirable. This surfaced recently where an attempt was made by a Planning Officer (un-successfully thanks to yours truly) to provide a rather spurious reason for refusal on the basis that a rutted access track made a development impractical…

Class Q provides magnificent opportunities to put agricultural buildings back into use and to make them work for you, but its use needs to be fully considered before the expense and time is put into putting an application together.

If you’ve got a farm building which could be put to a more profitable use, have it looked at properly before taking it forward, explore the provisions of the GPDO and the NPPG in detail and get your ducks in row before making an application.

I am always happy to provide a no-obligation appraisal over the phone on whether a potential project has mileage.