Rural Building Design and the Planning Officer
Robin Dower explains some of the complexities
To submit an application for planning permission even for a modest development of Listed Building Consent to make changes to an old and treasured building it helps to have some idea about what goes on in the local planning officer’s mind. This is not always transparent or easy to discover – or consistent between different authorities. One can consult the current collection of policies in the Local Development Framework and one can read Government Planning Policy Statements, but will also have to look at Supplementary Planning Documents, Village Plans, Parish Appraisals and Design Guidance, often rather conservative in tone.
Another way of finding what scope there is for a development is to seek an informal opinion on a proposal, what is called a ‘pre-application enquiry’. I have written on a couple of occasions recently asking whether such-and-such a proposal touched upon policy interests the planning authority would expect us to take into account before submitting our formal application. As this kind of question may require some effort for the planners to answer I was not surprised to find that a charge of £30 had been introduced for a written reply and a further £60 if we wished to follow this up with a site visit. The information received in the written reply was helpful though guarded: the planning officer’s opinions were personal and could not be taken as committing the Planning Authority in the matter of a decision on the formal application.
Then, beyond that, particularly in relation to Listed Building Consent applications, the recommendations of the planning officer may be influenced by responses from statutory consultees such as English Heritage. In some cases local amenity societies, of which the Northumberland and Newcastle Society is one, will be moved to comment and a local civic society will have its area of interest too.
A developer might well feel a bit at the mercy of all these opinions and it certainly seems true that ‘you can’t please everybody all of the time’. A few years ago I was rather put out when a planning officer quoted the design guide I had previously written for that authority to challenge aspects of the design for a proposed development for which I was the architect - hoist with my own petard! But the design guidance is only as valid as the imagination of its author and cannot hope to anticipate the imaginative response to the hundreds of different situations facing future designers.
I said earlier that design guidance is often rather conservative in tone. So it is and this seems to comfort many planning authorities and officers operating in rural areas. Appreciation and respect for the character of traditional buildings, their massing, form, scale and detailing does naturally lead to a sense that new development should rest on the same criteria. But an understanding of the impact of new materials and technologies on the form of buildings, the changing standards expected of them through the Building Regulations, quite apart from the inherent excitement of new forms of expression for new lifestyles, does also suggest that rural design may need to expand its scope to embrace the unexpected, the imaginative best of our time beyond the safe zone planners like to stay in. How can we help them step across the boundary of that zone?
CITY AND COUNTY
May 2008
