Demolishing and rebuilding on the same site may or may not need a planning application, so before you start navigating this potentially tricky route, take planning consultant Simon Rix’s advice
Lots of people, myself included, get very frustrated about many of the hurdles that have been put in place to stop people being able to get permission to build their own home. This is despite various warm words from policy makers down the years about supporting self-builders. Given the housing crisis facing us as a nation, many of these restrictions seem grossly unfair to anyone who aspires to build – or even just to live in – ahome they can afford.
The specific design and energy performance of any new house should, of course, be carefully considered, but often the biggest consent hurdle is getting the principle of residential use established for a plot, i.e. getting the authorities to agree that any home can be built there. One way many self-builders have found to work through this is to find a plot that already has a house on it. That should mean that this ‘residential use’ hurdle has already been cleared, but there are still things to watch out for and other permissions that will be needed.
DO I NEED A FULL PLANNING APPLICATION?
If you’re knocking down to rebuild, the short answer is probably but not always. If you’ve read my previous articles for Homebuilding and Renovating, you will know about Permitted Development (PD) rights. These are circumstances where planning consent is deemed to have already been given.
There is a PD right to demolish some houses, in certain areas and certain circumstances — if you inform the council what you are doing beforehand. However, you’ll still need to submit a full planning application for the home you want to build on the site. And if you demolish the existing house before getting permission for its replacement, you might lose the ‘residential use’ principle for the site that is so valuable. No residential house on site can equal no permission to use the site for residential use. Far better to submit a single planning application for both the demolition and the new house build all in one.
There is a relatively new Permitted Development right now in force that means a full planning application is not needed for the demolition of an office building and the construction of a new residential home on the same site. But this does not apply to sites where the existing building to be demolished is a residential dwelling. It only applies to demolishing offices and some other commercial-type buildings (specifically those with use classes B1a, b or c) and replacing them with a detached residential house. That said, it does offer self-b
