Planning Consultant Mark Doodes Outlines The Planning Regulations For Garden Rooms.

New Garden Room company offers a one-stop shop for your Garden Room, and that includes access to planning professionals.

We often receive questions from potential customers regarding the planning requirements and realise it causes a lot of uncertainty and stress, so we invited a planning expert to come and meet our Managing Director, Darren Field and discuss the issues impacting you – separating the truths from the myths and cutting through the noise to ensure you become more informed.

How do I know if I have Permitted Development Rights For My Garden Room?

It’s important to state from the outset when discussing any of these matters that the common assumption is that you have permitted development rights so that’s probably the first port of call – to establish if you have the rights to erect these outbuildings.

Some examples of where you don’t have those rights would be for; listed buildings, conservation areas have limited rights, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs). But there could be fundamentally other reasons – for example you could live on a ground floor flat with a garden and you might think you can erect structures in the garden. In fact flats and maisonettes don’t have any permitted development rights, and the same is also true of some houses that are built on a relatively modern estate – anything built in, say, the last 10 or 15 years. You shouldn’t assume that you have your full permitted development rights.

How might I lose my Permitted Development Rights?

A former occupier of your home 10, 20 or 30 years ago could have made a planning application – a seemingly unrelated application maybe – for a loft conversion, where the planning officer at that point in time considered it necessary – fairly or unfairly – to remove the permitted development rights to erect these structures. So don’t make the assumption you have them. Obviously, many houses do – most do, to be fair – but don’t make the assumption you have those rights. You can check those either with the council or by looking on the council’s website and going back over your site history and finding out if there are conditions attached to a previous permission. But don’t make the assumption that you have your full permitted development rights.

What Class of building is a Garden Room?

Garden Rooms are governed by the GPDO. The type of structures we’re talking about are called Class E buildings. Class A is to do with extensions etc, but Class E covers outbuildings and those rules are pretty generous.

What does the term ‘Reasonably Necessary’ mean?

In fairness to the government, their rules are pretty generous. You can erect buildings that cover up to 50% of the plot – that’s excluding your house. Typically in the rear garden and the side garden, but the building has to be reasonably necessary. So just because you could build something that’s the size of a primary school in your rear garden doesn’t mean that you can, because it has to pass a reasonably necessary test.

Most of the buildings that I’ve seen erected for offices or a gym or that type of use in the back garden would easily pass that test, but there was an interesting case of a gentleman in 2016 who erected a 10,000 square foot leisure complex in his back garden, complete with cinema and bowling alley, that didn’t meet the necessary test and the whole thing had to be removed. So it’s always worth making that inquiry.

How high can my Garden Room be?

The dimensions of the building are one set element, so you can have a building that’s up to two and a half metres tall when it’s less than two metres from the boundary, or up to three metres tall if it’s more than two metres from the boundary, and like I say, that building can cover as much of the area as you consider necessary of your garden – but just bear in mind that reasonably necessary test.

Can I make a retrospective planning permission application?

But most people don’t want to cover their garden in outbuildings – you want to use it for a specific purpose, such as an office, so in that sense you should be okay in that regard. Bear in mind also that you can apply for a certificate of lawfulness before or after you’ve had the building built and we often get inquiries very late in a conveyancing process where a client needs a documentation to prove that something didn’t require planning permission. Of course that’s a slight frustration and irony of the process – the government removing some of the red tape around outbuildings, then people end up having to make those applications at some point in the future.

Conclusion

So my advice certainly is to get permission in advance or have it confirmed as lawfully permitted development before you get to a position where you’re looking to sell a property or let it out, or prove that permission wasn’t required.

For more information, see our other videos featuring Planning Consultant Mark Doodes.

Recorded February 2023. This content does not constitute formal advice from New Garden Room Company or Mark Doodes Planning.