Viewing historic planning applications - is there a fee for this?

[twanmever]

My local council only has planning applications on the planning portal from 2000 onwards. I want to see an application from 1995.

They've told me I need to apply through the informal pre application planning advice route and pay a fee for them to look for this for me. I haven't even bought the property yet - I'm deciding whether to put an offer in. It's Grade 2 listed, so I want to make sure I have full facts before I make my decision.

Does anyone know if I can request this free of charge, or is it reasonable for me to have to pay £55 for a 28 day service to obtain this information? Thanks in hopeful anticipation of a response. I'm wondering if I can request this through FOI instead.

The chances are it isn't digital and is archived somewhere and they would have to pay to retrieve it from the archives so it's absolutely reasonable that you should bear the cost. I am not sure how helpful a 1995 application will be to you given the extensive changes to planning and building regs since then.

The fee sounds reasonable for what they'll need to do to access the application and get it to you.

But surely this will all be included in the information pack should you be successful with an offer? We got copies of old planning applications for our house in this way.

FOI likely won't help - a FOI request can be refused where information is 'reasonably accessible by other means', and information can be considered to reasonably accessible even if a fee is charged for that other means of access.

In my experience, a £55 fee for accessing old planning records is very likely to be found to be reasonable - so long as the Council includes the fee scheme in its publication scheme - sorry!

Thanks very much everyone for responding. It's the 28 days bit that's the worst part really. The reason I want to look at this historic records is because it's an old church I want to buy and I've just found out that in 1995 planning permission was granted to convert it into a 3 bedroomed residence, so wanted to read it through before I decided whether it was worth putting in an offer.

A 1995 planning consent is likely to have lapsed unless they’ve commenced the work, best check that the planning consent was implemented if this is a key issue for you. Otherwise just get a pre app and see whether your proposal meets current planning rules

You can apply for PP before owning the house. This happened with our old neighbour's house - potential vendor put in application for extension which was turned down. So they withdrew from sale.

Are you wanting to just view it or have a copy of the documents as this may affect the cost and time?

At my local council, historic ones are on microfiche, you just email them the planning reference and make an appointment to go and view it at the council offices. I’ve done it myself before and there’s no charge for doing this, I could make notes but couldn’t take photos or make copies.

I imagine though each council probably does it differently.

Did the 1995 conversion take place or is it still a church? Why do you want to see the old planning consent?