What is the role of a planning consultant?
We help you to identify what might be possible with a building site. I give advice at the Build It Live shows and people ask me what they can do with their homes or plots of land. Your local council is your first port of call for granting permission to build and will often point you in the direction of planning policies, but these can be confusing. A specialist consultant will understand all the rules and then help you interpret what that means in terms of what you can actually do with your site or building.
When is best to involve a professional?
As early as possible. The first stage might be that you go to the council, who will ask you to submit a pre-application. You have to ask them, broadly, what might be achievable for your land – ie can I self build a house? There’s often a fee involved here and a timescale of a few weeks, where the local authority will deliberate and come back with a response – so you’ll know if, theoretically, a residential dwelling might be feasible. For an existing home, you’ll be able to determine the approximate scale of an extension that might be allowed, for example. You can then go back to them with a more detailed pre-application with the specific design of the house and your proposed layout of the site.