Planning permission will need to be obtained from your local authority prior to building work if the property in question does not have any permitted development allowance as this has been used up, or your permitted development rights have been removed.

To apply for plannng permission you will need to either go online to the Planning Portal, or download a copy of their application forms from their local site e.g. www.merton.gov.uk.
If you are applying onlne via the Planning portal you will need to attach a copy of your drawings in Pdf format or you could post them seperately along with a cheque for £135.00 (on the portal ou can pay by credit card). You will also require a design statement, you can ask your architect to do this for you, if you are writing this yourself you can ask the council for some guidelines about what exactly they require from you from the design statement.

Once the application has been received by the council they will then check the application and make sure it is valid. Once it has been made valid it will be given a reference number, a case officer, and a decision date. You can call the planning department to get this information. Some loft companies will do this for you, and follow the application up on your behalf. If you are doing this yourself the application will be given 8 weeks to be decided. Within this time i would contact the case officer and find out when they will be undertaking their site visit. Try to be there so you can discuss the application with them briefly to find out what their views are. Most councils will probably not give you much information until the decision date, but it’s always worth a try. I would advise you try to find out as early as possible if they are happy with the application, if they are find out if they will be recommending the application for approval. If they are not happy ask them to give you the opportunity to submit amendments. Be careful if you are in the Richmond Borough, alot of their case officers are extremely difficult to deal with, and will more often than not not take your phonecalls, and if they are not happy with the application will just refuse the permission rather than give you a chance to amend something that could be simple.

This will be very frustrating if you have a time scale you need to stick to. As you will need to do all the neccessary amendments and then re-submit a whole new application, taking a further 8 weeks.

You could call the case officer every couple of weeks to find out what stage the application is at, and if they have made any decisions yet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Planning Permission, Planning Problems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.