George Hampson has found an ideal site that comes with permission to build his dream home – but an adjacent property is tied into the consent. Mike Dade takes a closer look at this complicated planning situation

Mike Dade

WHO George Hampson

WHAT Two rural plots for sale with one planning permission covering both sites. Will this situation complicate the opportunity to build one new five-bedroom home?

WHERE Norfolk

George Hampson has spent quite some time looking for suitable land on which to build a large, five-bedroom family home. He’d like something rural, but good plots in the countryside are few and far between. He’s found a promising looking opportunity on the market, but it’s complicated by virtue of there being two sites, for sale together or separately, but with only one planning permission covering both. Could this situation work out for George?

Two plots

The land is situated about a mile from a large village, along a quiet country road. It’s next to a small row of houses on one side, and fields on the other and opposite. The site used to be a timber yard, with a sprawl of buildings, large piles of logs and frequent comings and goings of heavy vehicles. The owners have done well to trade all of this in for planning permission for two big family houses, both fronting the road and with a shared access between them, which then splits off to each plot. The sites are about one third of an acre each – level, rectangular and mainly grass, with some hard surfacing here and there left over from the wood yard. There are trees to the back of one of the plots, but otherwise they look entirely straight-forward to build on.