Neighbour wanting to sell detached garage

[Tomorrowsanewday]

Hoping someone can advise.

Background is our neighbour sold off their large garden on which a developer built 2 other detached houses. Ours being one of them.

We all share the one drive with our property being in the middle.
Our neighbour who sold the land has a double detached garage beside our single garage with an 8’ long fence separating them. Our garages are not attached to each other.

We all get along well together and today my neighbour dropped into the conversation it was always their intention at some stage to convert their garage into a 2 bedroom house and sell it and that after lockdown would be looking into doing this, as well as selling their own property.

We have lived here over 10 and they’ve never mentioned this before or after us buying our property.
I was very taken aback as it would have influenced us in buying our property had we known.

At the moment I feel upset. Maybe unjustifiably.
We hadn’t envisaged having any more neighbours sharing the space or the inconvenience of building work being done.

My questions are do they require building permission for this conversion and will we be given an opportunity to voice our concerns?

I'm sure they will have to apply for planning permission, which you will get notification of and oppose. I'm sure someone with better knowledge will come along soon, but I'd give my local planning dept a call - ours where very helpful when developers bought land opposite us.

They will need planning permission to do this and you will get notified. From that you can object but it needs to be within the planning framework to be relevent , the planning dept will pick up this anyway. As they have already sold off land to build on then they may have a fair chance of success.

Get your house on the market quick! Or maybe between the both of you, find a developer who might want to purchase both parcels of land if that would work in a new development...