Planning law and consultation (and blocking the road!)

[Binkster]

Hi,

I live on a narrow street with no parking down one side. None of the houses have drive ways and a lot of them have 2 cars, so parking is a massive problem!

For the last month, 3 cars-worth of space has been taken up by 2 skips outside one of the houses, which is also covered in scaffolding and there are seemingly repairs going on to the roof. Having looked at the Council?s planning website, there is an application in to have a new roof put on, but as far as I can gather, it was only applied for a few weeks ago. There is a list of neighbours on the website and it appears that letters were sent out last week (not to us- for some reason we were missed out)- 3 weeks after the work has commenced!

Is there anything I can do about this? I?m more annoyed about the lack of consultation than anything else. Everyone has had real trouble parking over the last few weeks and the workmen are a nightmare- blocking the street while they load their vans and parking on the double yellows. It can cause huge problems on a street like ours, but it would have been polite of the neighbours and the Council to give us advance notice of the disruption. Have they done anything wrong, or are there some circumstances where you can start the work before the neighbours? letters go out?

B

I'm afraid the whole skips/parking thing is just part and parcel of living in a road with no off street parking.

If planning was required to replace the roof then they shouldn't have started before that had been granted, but obv no way of knowing whether the scaffolding went up and they couldn't know until they had really looked at the roof whether it was salvageable or not

I'm afraid you're just going to have to live with it. THey will have had to get permission from the council to put the skips on the public road but at the end of the day the work needs doing on the house and its just part of living on that sort of street. We live on a single track road and we've had problems of our own getting a skip even delivered and placed and the road is blocked most days by delivery vans / workmen etc. We all have the problem and we just accept it because tomorrow it might be you having to have the road blocked.

we had a similar situation. You should get on to the people at the council regardless and find out how this got through and why you didn't get notified.
However, the workmen will still be a nightmare - sometimes better just to grit your teeth and let them do it the way they want to as generally they prefer what's most convenient and therefore quicker for them... and you in the long run. also perhaps try contacting the householder and asking them for more details/time frame and explain the difficulties and ask if they could ask their workmen to be more considerate. The council were heavily involved in our road issues and a protocol was instigated whereby the workmen had to give everyone notice if they were going to block the road for a length of time, or move when asked (it was a cul-de-sac which made the problem much worse!)

Hi,

Thanks for the replies. I've calmed down a bit now- they blocked the road this morning for ages (well it seemed like ages, but was probably 5-10 minutes) and made me late for work- but what really annoys me is that as I drove past, 3 workmen (who'd been unloading the truck) watched me go by without even a thank you or a wave- so rude!

I've e-mailed the council to find out where we didn't get consulted. I get your point Rebl about we might be next- it's just their rudeness that annoys me more than anything else- I understand that they have things that need to be done. When other people on the street have work done, they let other people know what's going on, which is great and I don't mind the fact that they have repairs to make- just this particular house do whatever they like and don't care about letting anyone else know how long it's going to be going on for!

Have been on the other side of this when a neighbour rang the scaffolding company and told them the scaffolding was covering a water main (it wasn't) all just to get the scaffolding removed as it was blocking a potential parking space. Never got to the bottom of who this was but it was only luck that I was present when the company turned up or the scaffolding would have come down and my roof would never have got finished.

(Ironically, scaffolding only went up because another neighbour complained to the council that he roof was being replaced without scaffolding which was, apparently, illegal).

Neighbours, eh?

You need to contact the Council to ask them why you haven't been notified. Not everybody in a street will be notified about works that require planning permission and it may be that you are unlikely to be directly affected by the work to the house and therefore it wouldn't be necessary to notify you. It's not practical to notify people just for the sake of it and most Council's have set guidelines stating who will be notified in set situations (with some element of judgement thrown in for good measure). It's not normal for a Council to notify a whole street about a proposal unless there is potential for every house to be affected.

The disruption which is part and parcel of development, i.e. skips and workman's vans is not something that the Council can normally control anyway. The Council is also unlikely to know when work is likely to start and therefore cannot notify neighbours about that, however it would have been courteous for your neighbours to let people know themselves and to ask their builders to try to be amenable to neighbours rather than wind them up.

In an ideal world everybody would apply for, and wait for the grant of, planning permission before they start to do any works but sometimes situations arise where it starts off as a job that wouldn't need planning permission and depending on what is found when works are underway it may have then turned into a much bigger job which needs planning permission.

I s'pose what I'm getting at is that it's not at all unreasonable for you to be a bit peeved by what's happened and you should contact the Council to find out more information about what's going on but it might be wise to start with the basis that the Council may not have done anything wrong and it won't help to assume they are at fault or to take your frustration out on them. (Big Disclaimer - I'm not saying you would but there are far too many who would and it doesn't help them in the long run )

Hope you get some answers whatever the situation turns out to be and that this makes some sense!

[Must remember to check the dates on posts before replying!]