Planning Portal updates to accommodate new English policy changes
You may be aware there have been a few policy changes announced recently that came into effect today (Wednesday 15 April 2015).
Quite a major change will see the consolidation of the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 1995 and the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2010 – both have been amended a huge number of times since they were introduced.
These have been consolidated in the guise of the:
Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015.
Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015.
To cater for the change we have updated our suite of 1APP forms with the new legislative titles.
Coupled with this the Government has introduced many new permitted development changes which can be found in the attached explanatory memorandum.
We have updated the site guidance to reflect the new changes. Updating the interactive guides will be completed shortly.
On evaluating the policy there will be new permitted development rights subject to a prior approval process for many of the changes.
In light of this we shall facilitate a standard approach on the Planning Portal by creating new prior notification forms. We have created drafts and sent them to a LPA quality assurance group to ensure they contain all the correct information required by legislation for them to be processed quickly and efficiently.
We are currently updating them to incorporate the feedback received and they should be in place by the end of this week.
We’d like to thank Medway, Salford, South Derby, Tunbridge Wells and Wandsworth councils for helping review these new forms.
The policy change will see new forms for:
- A new permitted development right, for a three year period, will allow storage or distribution buildings (B8) to change use to residential (C3).
- A new permitted development right will allow amusement arcades/centres and casinos, (sui generis uses) to residential (C3) use and carry out associated building works that are reasonably necessary to make this change.
- A new permitted development right to allow the change of use from shops (A1), financial and professional services (A2), betting offices, pay day loan shops and casinos to restaurants and cafés (A3)
- A new permitted development right to allow the change of use from shops (A1) and financial and professional services (A2) to assembly and leisure uses (D2), with an upper threshold of 200m2 of total floor space.
- A new permitted development right to allow retailers to erect click and collect facilities within the curtilage of their existing shop, for example, on car parks.
- A new permitted development right will allow for temporary filming and the associated operational development for the sole purpose of commercial filmmaking.
- A new permitted development right which will apply to the installation, alteration or replacement of Solar Photovoltaics (PV) on the roofs of nondomestic buildings, up to a capacity of 1 Megawatt, subject to certain limitations.
Please note that the new prior notification forms will not be available on the online application system, fee calculator or paper form chooser. This means that the forms below do not currently carry specific LPA details or branding.
Following their introduction by the end of this week we shall make them available on the Portal’s PDF forms page. I’ll blog again when they are live.
We anticipate that following the transition to a new Planning Portal IT infrastructure, we may be able to accommodate the new and existing prior notification forms into the full suite of 1APP online forms and more will follow on this in the coming months.
Planning Portal Blog 
Please can you advise when the planning forms will be updated with the amended ownership certificates (as per DMPO 2015).
Thank you
The online forms should all be correct now. We’re re-rendering the paper forms as we speak, but they should be complete by the end of the day.
Sarah
Please can you advise what the national planning policy would be on the developement of redundant allottment sites, so as to provide the neccessary homes in the urban area of Dover.
It is a strange situation since part of the same site received planning permission to build in excess of eighty properties a few years past. The area has grown wild with brambles and shrubs since its neglect from the 1960’s when it was allottments . Since one council passes plans on allottments and anoughter does not. What can be considered permitted use?
Just to let you know that the telecoms prior notification form is still displaying Part 24 rather than Part 16 of the new GPDO (SI 2015 No. 596), although the guidance note is correct. I tried emailing support@ but the link doesn’t work – “undeliverable”.
Hi Pippa. Thanks for raising this. We are aware of this problem and our suppliers are working to fix it and get it updated as soon as possible. Apologies for any inconvenience it is causing. I’ll post an update when the change is live. Sarah
The jobs in the Planning Jobs section are mostly not planning jobs. What has happened to this previously usedul section?
Hi. The jobs feed is an automated one and unfortunately one publisher in particular seems to mis-tagging their education jobs. We’ll take another look to see if we can filter them out in a different way.
Sarah