By John Caine

Much has been said about the proposed changes in Planning Legislation and its potential impact on helping the economy to grow.

Too often the Planning process is seen as stifling development and as we all know keeping the construction industry moving with projects provides two key benefits, firstly the industry is labour intensive and helps many UK based industry to keep busy whilst the project as a whole requires a wide range of skills to create the finished building. The second long lasting benefit is the new building which is an investment no matter what it is used for i.e. commercial, retail, education, health or leisure. The building will help create or maintain employment and is an asset for its owners and users.

One aspect of the proposed relaxation of the planning legislation is the possibility to have a “change of use” for a building made much easier than it has been historically.

This could be very helpful for Groups who want to set up a new Free School who can make use of an existing building for this purpose. It has been reported that some Free School operators have struggled to obtain Planning Permission and felt that Local Authorities were making the process difficult due to political ideology where the Local Authority did not agree with the principle of Free Schools and this made the Planning Application more difficult.

A considered view from the City of London Planning Chief is that a change of use in the heart of the City of London from Commercial use to residential could have a detrimental impact on the reputation and long term good of the City of London. The reasoning behind this view is that at present residential values are greater than commercial values and if the owner of a large office building was to propose a change of use to residential then this could result in the creation of a residential block with say 50 long leases issued which would make it almost impossible to change the use of that building back into commercial from residential and therefore the commercial use of that building would be lost forever.

As with all things as complex as Planning Legislation any relaxation can be shown to have both potentially positive and negative aspects to it. However the concept of relaxation has to be seen as an essential catalyst for growth because for too long the planning process has slowed down much needed appropriate and well designed development.

Of course for Curtins Consulting the change of use relaxation in the Planning Legislation provides another great opportunity for the use of our Ecofurbishment skills to re-model existing buildings.