Planning Consultant Mark Doodes Outlines The Planning Rules 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.

Darren: In some cases, even under your advice – where we go for planning permission, they actually tell us that it is fine – we only need to inspect the drainage. But at least we’ve gone through the motions of putting the planning app in and they’ve come back and everything is on public record.

Mark: You’ll obviously always get completion certificates don’t you for your work?

Darren: Yes, absolutely – they’re electronic of course.

What are the planning rules for Garden Rooms?

Mark: Garden Rooms are governed by the same regulations which cover all types of domestic outbuildings those would be things like kennels, swimming pools, workshops, sheds, enclosures, garages – that type of thing and those are all referred to in planning circles as outbuildings, and those are governed by Statutory Instruments 596 of 2015 which is all available on the legislation.gov.uk website. Those rules are not particularly easy to read or interpret in their raw form but there are some really useful resources available online – for example on the planning portal.

Darren: So I understand it can be quite bureaucratic. How do you make this simpler for people, Mark?

Mark: The most important thing that people should understand about outbuildings is that there are two elements to it. There’s the dimensions side of it – so how big is something, or how tall, or how much land it covers in your curtilage, and then the other aspect is the use of the building. So often people focus on just the dimensions of the building when actually they need to also think about how the building is going to be used. Because if you use a building in a way that doesn’t satisfy the planning regulations then it triggers the need for a planning application.

What’s the difference between Incidental Use and Ancilliary Use?

Darren: So let me be clear then – I can’t just move granny in next Tuesday at the bottom of the garden into a shed?

Mark: That’s right – you can’t, because that would be considered an ancillary form of residential accommodation – an extension of the house rather than using that building in a way that’s incidental to the house.

So those two words are quite important in planning: incidental and ancillary.

The way I like to think of it is, with an incidental use, you have to think, “would you be doing that if the house wasn’t there?” So for example, would you be working? Would you be in a workshop? Would you be growing vegetables?

The answer is, you probably would, in which case that’s an incidental use.

But with an ancillary use you’re using that space as an extension of the house and that’s particularly true of overnight accommodation. But certainly things like offices. People often work in offices in towns and cities away from their home, so working from an office is an example of something that would be considered an incidental use rather than ancillary use.

Retrospective Planning Applications for Garden Rooms

Darren: As we know during Covid, these things were flying up in every street, in every town, in every city across the UK like crazy. We’ve seen them wedged up against people’s back fences, attached to houses… Surely they’re up now – they can’t do anything about it? When is that going to come back to haunt everybody?

Mark: We’ve found a lot of inquiries from people who have erected a structure which doesn’t quite meet the regulations, then that might be holding up the sale of three, four, five different houses further down the chain. It becomes a very stressful process late in the day where you need to rush through a planning application one way or another, and assuming it’s going to be approved, but if it’s refused or if there are other problems it can really aggravate the the house sale.

So it’s really important to get the documentation in place from the outset.

How do I know if I have Permitted Development Rights?

Darren: Okay, so let’s put this another way then. Let’s just imagine you’re not a planning expert for 10 minutes. How would you go about starting the research for building a Garden Room?

Mark: The first thing you need to establish is, “is your house listed?” For example, if you’re in an AONB  – an area of outstanding natural beauty – if you are in a conservation area, or if you’ve had your permitted development rights removed for whatever reason in the past… It could be a planning application that a previous owner made 20, 30 years ago, where the council deemed it appropriate at the time – reasonably or otherwise – to remove your permitted development rights, and you might be carrying on completely unaware that you actually don’t have the rights to erect those outbuildings.

We’ve won a few cases where people have, and we’ve reinstated those rights and then allowed somebody to build the outbuilding rather than apply for planning permission for the outbuilding in the first place.

Is my planning application likely to be refused?

Darren: Okay, so there’s a few parameters – a little bit of expert advice that you need before you even start. Just to see what size, what shape or what insulation, whether the ground is soft, what sort of base it needs – but there’s no reason why if you get all that information together and do it professionally that you shouldn’t get it through planning permission, if you want to go that way?

Mark: That’s right. I mean, people are often quite reticent about making a planning application, but the type of planning applications we’re talking about – which are called householder applications, which are typically things like extensions and maybe a loft conversion, a large porch or outbuildings,  for example – around 90% of those applications are approved nationally, so there’s no reason to believe that your application – just because you have to make it – will get refused, and obviously you also have the route to go down of appeal. So even if you are refused, you have the opportunity for a second, impartial party who’s a Planning Inspector to come out and assess the decision made by the council.

Conclusion

Darren: So I can move granny in – just not next Tuesday?

Mark: I do recommend getting permission in advance. We’re going back to earlier, talking about the difference between the physical dimensions of the building and its use, so we’ve sort of covered a bit about the use and understanding that an accommodation does require Planning Permission.

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.