We got our planning permission granted for our latest project, but it wasn’t easy!!! We are going to share here more about our experience of the planning permission process…
After we had submitted our application we had to complete a few additional items to validate our application. The first step was called validation and Bristol City Council (BCC) required certain documents to be included before they would start to consider an application. This can be different for each submission, depending on the project and probably the council too. In our example, we were required to produce a sustainability and strategy statement. After validation, there was a wait of around four weeks before we had any communication from BCC. At this point, they wrote an email to let us know of the reasons why our plan would NOT be accepted. This did not feel positive at all, however, we still had time to make changes, and during the next few weeks, we worked with the planning consultant, architect and BCC to update the plan to address the issues raised. We then submitted our updated plan to BCC and waited several more weeks for further communication. Due to their busy workload, we didn’t receive confirmation of their decision until the day before the deadline… A little nerve wracking to say the least! However, we are pleased to announce that we had planning permission GRANTED! We were absolutely delighted with this outcome as it was such a big milestone for us to start the project as planned. Look out at https://www.facebook.com/solutionproperty/ for our next big renovation blog.
Lessons Learnt?
The lesson that we leant from the planning process was that if you work with the council in an open reasonable way and be adaptive with your ideas and plans, they will consider your application in a positive way. It has been a challenge and a great learning experience!
Would we do it again?
The answer is ‘yes’ and we will do larger projects next time.