Through planning

A pre-application enquiry buys an officer’s written view of a scheme before it becomes public, and it earns its fee wherever the principle of development is arguable. I ask a few answerable questions rather than a general one: is residential development acceptable here in principle, what would you need to see before you could recommend approval, and which of the constraints on this land do you consider decisive.

What comes back tells me which parts of the scheme are contested, and that is usually the difference between a clean determination and a year of rounds. Where the answer is discouraging I would rather have it in writing at this stage than discover it from a committee report, because a scheme redrawn before submission costs a fraction of a scheme redrawn after refusal.

Next: what actually goes into the application

The drawings are the smallest part of the bundle. Location and block plans, existing and proposed floor plans, elevations and sections, and a site plan carrying levels, parking, drainage and boundary treatments come from the architect working to my brief.

Around them sit the reports the constraints have called for, a design and access statement explaining why the scheme looks as it does, and the certificates recording who owns the land and who has had notice. Where the authority validates against a local list, an ecology assessment and a biodiversity net gain metric will be on it.

Each piece is prepared by whoever is qualified to sign it. I write the brief, hold the sequence, keep every consultant working on the same revision of the same drawing, and submit.

Next: what validation actually checks

An application is not live on the day it is sent. It is live on the day it is validated, and the gap between those two dates belongs entirely to whatever is missing. The authority runs the bundle against a national list and its own local list, and where one item is absent the whole thing sits in an invalid pile until it arrives.

The items that most often hold a small application back are the dull ones: a location plan at the wrong scale, a red line that fails to include the access, a certificate signed for the wrong ownership, an ecology report referred to but not attached. None of them is difficult, and all of them cost weeks if they are found by the authority rather than by me.

So I read the local list before the bundle is assembled, not after, and I treat it as the actual specification for the submission. The design is my argument; the list is the door I have to get it through.

Next: the weeks between submission and a decision

Once the application is valid the authority publicises it, consults the parish council and the technical consultees, and takes representations from anyone who wishes to make one. Every word of that correspondence goes onto the public register, which is why I would rather a neighbour heard about a scheme from me or from the site notice than from the internet.

Inside that period the case officer forms a recommendation, and most small schemes are then decided under delegated powers rather than at committee. A scheme goes to committee where the parish objects and the officer recommends approval, where a member calls it in, or where the application is unusual enough to warrant it, and that adds a cycle to the calendar because committees sit to their own dates.

What I do through those weeks is answer quickly. A consultee raises a point, the officer forwards it, and the difference between a scheme that is approved and one that drifts is usually how long the applicant takes to send back a revised sheet. By the time the recommendation is written I want every technical objection either answered or visibly being answered.

Next: conditions, and which of them bite first

Consent arrives with conditions, and the ones that matter are pre-commencement: those whose wording says no development shall take place until the authority has approved something. Until they are discharged, work on site is unlawful even though permission exists.

They usually cover materials, surface water drainage, the construction management plan, archaeology where the historic environment team has flagged the ground, and the highway works. Some conditions instead bite later — before the building is occupied, or before the last dwelling is sold — and sorting a notice into those three groups on the day it arrives is the single most useful hour in the whole route.

Next: lifting a condition before a machine arrives

Discharging a condition means submitting what it asks for under a formal application and waiting out the determination period. That is why I stack them by dependency rather than by the order they happen to be printed in: the drainage details govern the groundworks, the archaeology condition governs whether the ground can be stripped at all, and the highways condition governs whether a vehicle can lawfully reach the site.

Each submission names the condition number, quotes the original application reference, and attaches exactly what the wording asks for and nothing else, because a discharge application that answers a different question is refused as readily as a bad scheme.

Outline consent establishes the principle of development and holds back the detail for a later approval. That later approval is the reserved matters application, and it has to be determined before any of the matters it covers can be built. It is a useful route where the principle is the contested part and the design is not, because it lets the argument be won once.

It carries its own trap, though. An outline consent is granted with time limits attached: a period within which the reserved matters application must be made, and a further period within which development must begin. Miss either and the consent lapses, and the ground goes back to being a field with a history rather than a site with a permission.

Next: between consent and start on site

The gap between permission and a spade is where a scheme is made or lost. In it I have the technical package produced: building regulations drawings, a structural design with foundations written against the actual ground investigation, the drainage design above and below ground, and the setting-out the groundworker builds to.

By the time the first machine arrives I want the building control route chosen and the notice lodged, the utility connections applied for with their lead times booked, and every trade holding the same drawing number, because a connection date is not something a builder can accelerate.

That is the end of the planning route and the beginning of the build. The sheet before this one sets out the order the trades then come on; the sheet after it sets out how a site earns its way onto this route in the first place.

Next sheet: site selection, and what rules a site out