New Reg's

Introduction

Heard about the new Reg's? Read on.....

After much consultation the government trumpeted the introduction of the new householder permitted development regulations on the 1st October 2008 as a major relaxation of the rules to make it easier for householders to carry out work to their houses without having to make an application to their local council for planning permission.

In some respects the new reg's are more liberal and in other ways not.

So, what are the new Regulations?

The new regulations are contained in a document called a Statutory Instrument(SI). In this case its SI 2008 No 2362 and it AMENDS the parts of the old reg's (General Permitted Development Order 1995 SI 1995 No 418) which dealt with householder development. That's it. Part of the old regs' have been replaced with new ones.

Summary.

Householder permitted development rights are still contained in the 1995 Order as follows:

PART 1:         old PART 1 replaced by new PART 1 by SI 2008 No 2362

PART 2:         unchanged from 1995 Order

PART 40:       introduced into the 1995 Order by SI 2008 No 675. This covers micro-generation equipment

What was the substance of the change?

The chief difference is a change from mainly VOLUME based extension allowances to mainly DIMENSION based allowances.

How do householders benefit?

One big plus for householders is the new approach to dormer type loft conversion allowances. There are still volume based limits for these (and they're reasonable) but they're now separate from extensions. Under the old reg's a previous, say, single storey extension might have used up the old total volume limit and left no allowance for a dormer.

Wrinkles & Wrangles....click here for our commentary on some disputed meanings of words and phrases in the new regulations