Property

The permissive society

The planners are making life harder for any school hoping to embark on a new build. John Cahill vents his frustration at the flurry of new bureaucratic demands from the pen pushers at the town hall

At university, I shared a flat with a brilliant mathematician who went on to do a PhD at MIT. I considered the fact that he looked exactly like Omar Sharif and attracted women with electromagnetic power demonstrated that the good Lord was not always particularly fair when He came to handing out talent.

Abdul did not believe that solving a question of high grade mathematics was enough. For him, it only worked if the solution was elegant. Indeed, he would throw reams of paper away that failed to meet his exacting criteria (actually, I think that applied to his women too). My business has become anything but elegant and by that I do not mean the buildings (highly subjective), but the way in which we have to solve our particular problems.

Take planning permission, for one example: the committee graciously, and begrudgingly, grants planning permission to a major school (possibly the largest employer in their borough) usually with a slightly distasteful sneer because it is “independent”. Crack open the champagne, celebrate and get on with the building work. Not so! It doesn’t work like that any more and this article serves to forewarn you.

Pen pushers abound
All local and central Government offices have increased their bureaucracy. Quite how we have allowed this to happen I cannot contemplate, but when you get planning permission, actually, you haven’t.

Your application (which has been subject to many consultative papers) has an awful lot of conditions to be discharged after the permission, but before you can start building. It is rather like asking the athlete, Michael Johnson, to win his Olympic Gold in 400 metres and then, without a pause, settle down on the blocks again to beat Ed Moses over hurdles, because now there are 20 or 30 new obstacles, all of which have to be overcome. In addition, the latest ruse is to charge you an additional fee for every single condition that has to be discharged. This is enhanced by the local authority’s ability to decide to take every condition separately as they have to treat everyone as a new “application” and consult on it (ie delay).

Unbelievable as this sounds, I have a planning permission for a major building where we are currently discharging some 16 additional conditions, each one could have a separate fee and each is going through the planning process all over again. It needs to be dealt with by central Government. When applying for planning permission, you need to get the conditions reduced to the smallest number and, if possible, enjoined as completed and discharged elements within the application.

How it works
To illustrate this absurdity, one of the conditions we have just had to discharge is that the local authority wishes to see the Contractor’s Construction Management Plan (a sort of H&S document). Over and above the fact that there is sufficient legislation to make it illegal if the contractor does not have a suitable plan (and therefore is really irrelevant to the local planning authority), we have had to submit it. You cannot get a plan from a contractor until you have appointed him and you are not going to appoint him until you start work. Having got the document, we submitted it to the local authority who then announced that they were to send it out for public consultation for 28 days! Enter stage right: general pandemonium and unhappiness. This took a little while to get back on track and was possibly helped by pointing out that the local authority is not, technically or legally, able to comment on the document in the first place.

Twenty-five years ago, a planning application consisted of a form and a set of documents and, if necessary, a “notice” to the freeholder of the site. Today, it might consist of 20 different reports and submissions and 20 different consultees. It will certainly contain a huge number of post-approval dischargeable conditions.

So, when you think you have got your planning permission – you haven’t. You’ve just done your 400 metres – get ready for the hurdles.

John Cahill is managing director of Barnsley Hewett and Mallinson.

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