Has anyone had their neighbour object to a planning application?

[HeadFairy]

How did you stop yourself from killing them

Very frustrated, neighbours who previously said they would be fine with proposed building work have lodged an objection claiming their light will be adversely affected in their kitchen.

They are now totally avoiding us, our front doors face each other and three times today they've scuttled away when normally they'd stop to chat.

Not sure what I can do but sit and wait for the planning dept to make their mind up, but just wanted to vent.

Has anyone else had objections against their planning application and still gone on to win?

It depends on the developer and type of development.

what's your point? My house is nice. The house next door is nice, and fairly recently gutted and done up. But apparently not what the owners wanted, which begs the question 'why buy it?'.

It's all about the money, innit? Developers tend to see property developing as a way of making money - if that involves concreting over green spaces, or imposing on the neighbours then too bad, it seems.

but my neighbours aren't developers. They're just people who buy a perfectly nice house (paying £££££ for it) and decide it's not what they want (presumably was never what they wanted, given that they put in for planning pretty much as soon as they landed) so then spend more £££££ altering it, at our inconvenience and, we believe, to our detriment. But apparently the only thing that matters is that they get the house they wanted (but didn't buy). Sod us and what we wanted when we bought our house (which was what we did buy).

To be honest i don't want the neighbours to hate us and we may well settle on half the extension size i.e. just extend the kitchen rather the whole width of the house. Because the rear of our house face east we only get morning sun in the back of the house before it moves to the side. The extension would then cast a shadow on the neighbours conservatory because of this. We are going to apply for pp around September time so will have a chat with both sides first to let them know the proposals. If they are against it we will revise them i think. A colleague of mine is just in the middle of a build in the exact same position of house and extension and had no objection from her neighbours so you never know.

I feel your pain Tam - but they are developing the house presumably to add value therefore they are developers.
If it was up to me I would make the planning laws in the UK much more in favour of the local residents and community - or at the very least redress the balance.

Tam it sounds like they are changing their house to suit their needs and lifestyle. In London, you should know, finding the exact house you want in the location you want is impossible. Most people buy good enough in the right location and then change what doesn't work.

People have been changing this country's historical housing stock for generations to accommodate an ever changing lifestyle. To fit in modern conveniences like bathrooms and utility rooms, knocking through double reception rooms etc.

Also, planning laws in the UK are very tight compared to the US. In America you can pull down most housing and develop whatever you want. Only recently have some constraints been put in place.

The way people live is changing and that's reflected in changes being made to the housing stock. If you don't want to be impacted by other people's life choices you need to live on a detached piece of land in the country and even then you can't escape an evolving society.

I mean the English live in some of the smallest housing on average in the Western world. Its hardly surprising people are extending for more space.

but why should their 'needs and lifestyle' trump ours? And it's not impossible to find the right house in the right place - we did it. It's getting less right by the year, though, and not because our needs have changed, though we've had DD in the interim. It's hard to understand why a large, 3 double bed terraced house is big enough for a family of 3, but not for one bloke on his own (first owner to do the illegal extension), and a couple with no plans for children (I assume, as they've turned it into a 1 bed house).

People keep saying that if I don't want the house next door to be extended etc I should move to the middle of nowhere - well, right back at ya, if all this extra space is so vital then you move to somewhere where you can have all the space you want - not a Victorian terraced house in London!

and of course, why should your 'needs and lifestyle' trump theirs?

Planning laws may be tihht compared to the UK - but that does not mean planning laws are not skewed massively in favour of the developers.
Anyone whose development impacts adversely on whatever way on others is imposing their will - and there is very little the people affected can do.

tight compared to the US

but the supposition on this thread appears to be that they/we should - apparently it's us who should move, us who should compromise etc etc - when they've not had to one jot. It always seems that the people being inconvenienced have to suck it up whilst the inconveniencers have all the 'rights' and law on their side.

The OP wants to kill her neighbours for objecting to her plans. I'm giving you the other side of the story - because, you know, there is another side. The side that has to put up with building works 6 days a week for 5 months. The side that sees the (very rare for London) beautiful green corridor of the gardens - one of the things that drew us to this house - disappear in studios and workshops and whathaveyou. The side that is staring a whopping great illegal-as-it-turns-out-but-jack-shit-that-we-can-do-now extension in the face every day - that came about because we understood it didn't need planning and didn't want to be unneighbourly. Well, look where that got us. So fuck being unneighbourly - been there, done that, got the T shirt. Won't make that mistake again. The side that has glaring spotlights lighting up half our house 'oh yes, it was a mistake, the architect should have taken those off the plans but we're not going to do anything about it'.

If a family of 5 moved in it might at least make sense. But 2 sets of owners - a single man and a childless couple - clearly rolling in cash - not so much. I couldn't give a stuff right now about their rights and the law - they have made us very miserable in our own home and I hate them.

Tam, it sounds like your neighbours are indeed arses.... I hope I'm not. I'm doing my best not to be. I'm very conscious of the impact of building work on the neighbours, we've had to suffer some of that impact ourselves when others have done building work.

Just to give a little context, we bought this house just before dd was born because we were gazumped on another house, we were due to exchange the next day and then the vendor decided to sell to someone else who offered £25k more. Foolishly we'd already sold our other place so we were living at my mum and dad's, so we bought this house after being homeless for three months. It wasn't ideal, we knew that at the time, like many Victorian houses the bathroom is tiny because it's been carved out of another bedroom. We decided that we'd only stay here 5 years and move on, however in that time the market has gone bonkers here (we're in Surrey), to buy a four bed, 2 bath house here now we'd need to find another £250k which we just don't have. The loft conversion will cost us around £60k.

We couldn't have predicted what would happen to the housing market because when we bought in 2009 there were dire warnings of recessions, depressions, housing market collapses etc, but the opposite has happened.

We're not looking to make a quick buck, if we get to do the work we intend to stay until the kids move on, given they're 5 and 7 that's quite a while

I feel your pain Tam, not all of us are nasty bastards trying to make a fast buck and screw everyone else. Our neighbour came over last night to talk us through what they're planning to say to the council. We've already agreed to move some windows, I will bend over backwards to keep them happy because we will still have to live next door to them and I can't bear the thought of there being tension in this road. It's such a great road.

I'm not an arse either but I really think our neighbours are! They have an extension very similar to our plans so we feel it's a case of 'do as I say & not as I do'.
They are complaining that our extension will ruin their kitchen view - well their kitchen view is MY garden so they can go royally fuck themselves with that - it's not like they are being blocked from a seaside view or sthing.

Ours are basically against an extension of any scale & planners have told them our plans are merely bringing a modest dwelling to modern day living standards. I told their councillor if they didn't want neighbours they should have bought the house themselves.

I appreciate the building work will be a pain but Cest la vie, we want it completed as quickly as possible. We have also been told they are planning a further extension in a few years, sunroom & utility room. They have made a rod for their own back & we will be as awkward for them as they have been to us.

Tam, people in my opinion should be reasonably allowed to do what they feel they need to their own property as long as they aren't harming others.

I believe planning laws exist to prevent unreasonable harm to neighbours amenity but you are defining harm very generously. If you are in a terrace any major extension should be subject to a party wall agreement. In that agreement, hours and days of work are decided by an objective professional. Our partywall stipulated work had to be finished by 5pm and could only happen between very restricted hours on a Saturday. The noise and disruption would only be significant if you worked from home and if you work from home its not reasonable to expect that lifestyle choice to prevent someone else making changes to their own home.

Losing a view of someone else's property can't really be harm either.

I've been on both sides of this. Two of my neighbours recently had extensions done and I honestly barely noticed.

Applications (at least where I live) are regularly refused if they will actually materially reduce light into a habitable room (i.e not a bathroom etc).

To be frank, it doesn't matter that you can't understand someone else's lifestyle needs-- its none of your business and its not your house.

If your neighbour constructs something illegally or doesn't abide by agreements then that's a different matter but its unfair to characterise most development in that way.

Property developing will rarely 'harm' others - but what they often do is impact negatively on others, and these residents have very few grounds to appeal a planning decision. If you live in an area which regularly refuses applications which reduce light into a habitable room then you should consider yourself extremely lucky - most LA's do not refuse planning on these grounds.

If the impact is material I have seen applications refused. The threshold isn't 'any' reduction in light though. Around here doing anything beyond permitted development is hard to get approved as the terraces are so close together. Maybe I am lucky, but I don't think so. I do think planners try to balance out an owners right to change their home to meet their needs and a neighbour's right to not be harmed by smother's actions.

I suspect the fact that you live in an area where terraces are close together has an impact on their decisions. My experience of being involved in responding to planning apps over the years has opened my eyes massively to the power that developers have in comparison to local residents - with Councillors over ruling planning recommendations regularly.

With commercial developers I too have seen the process manipulated by local officials. However, I've not seen that for an ordinary person applying for an extension. I think we are talking apples and oranges here as I agree with what you've said.

I'm afraid I have seen it - which again reinforces the inconsistent, skewed nature of planning across the UK.

Wow, just seen their objections... They didn't pull their punches. They've added a couple of things they hadn't mentioned to us, such as we'd over shadow their garden. At 11am this morning the sun had already rounded our house and was shining at the side across all our gardens including theirs so the height of the property wouldn't make the blindest bit of difference. They've also put a really snidey comment that if the house wasn't suitable for us why did we buy it and that we should move. For us to move to a house the size we need around here would cost us three times the amount of the extension, we just can't do that.

I've just seen our 'objectors' comments too (Thursday was the cut off date) disproportionately upset me tbh.

Fingers crosssed OP that things work out in the end

Headfairy, if your objectors are wrong you have nothing to worry about. Ring the planners and ask if them what they think. They may ask to see some evidence to prove your neighbour is wrong which you can commission. However, if they are obviously wrong, the planners will just let you know not to worry. That was what happened with us. The planner said it was clear that their would be no loss of light and that we didn't need to respond with any evidence.

These things work out so don't get yourself upset.

Thanks for the advice Londongirl, I will try and call the planning office on Monday. What's really frustrating is that when I'm at work I can't make any phone calls, so I sit and fume, frustrated at my inability to do anything.

Another two have put in objections now. The first one across the street have said it will affect their light (how is that even possible, we have a 2 way road between us and by the time the sun dips below our house the angle is such that the shadow is cast on to a different house 3 doors down from them. The other house has objected on the grounds that it will upset the character of the street and will encourage HMOs and what this road really needs is more family homes. I'm so upset because that's all we want to do, to make this house more suitable for a family. Given the bathroom is tiny and the third bedroom isn't big enough to get a single bed in, I can't see how they think we're doing anything other than making this more of a family home.

I could cry, I really could.

HeadFairy I totally understand how you are feeling.

We are stuck in 'planning permission hell' at the moment as well. It's a very different situation from yours - we're trying to get pp to rebuild our collapsed boundary wall as a fence (can't afford to build another wall).

The level of bureaucracy is just astounding. In addition to drawings, block plans and forms, we need photos showing what the fence will look like. It will look like a fence FFS! The irony is that when we applied for pp for the 2-storey extension we just had to state 'bricks to match existing'.

I, too, could cry (I did the other night). This has been going on since December and we don't even have a validated pp application yet. At this rate it's going to be May before the pp decision is even made and, in the meantime, we currently have a garden that looks like a reenactment of the Somme and every man and his dog can see straight across our garden and into the house.