Oversized building construction

[Pica-Pica]

Equus said:

Antony Moxey said:

Hehe, council jobsworth would send a team of surveyors out so he didn't have to deal face to face with the property owner.

Actually, he wouldn't: the 'Council Jobsworth' would be an Enforcement Officer from the Planning department, and he or she would most certainly come out to deal with the property owner face to face.

It's a bloody tough job - one I wouldn't take for any money - and the people who do it are usually very sensible, reasonable human beings.

Also bear in mind that the 'Council Jobsworth' doesn't go around looking for things to enforce against; they are almost entirely reactive, so if we're using pejorative terms, there has to be a 'Curtain Twitching Busybody' or a 'whining NIMBY' to report the breach to them before they'll get involved in the first place.

Atomic12C said:

Do you have a figure for what is a reasonable tolerance in planning law?
(Is it a simple percentage figure or is it a defined length/height?)

There isn't one. It's a matter for judgement in the individual circumstances, and ultimately will come down to whether the deviation is considered to be 'material' or not.

In your case, to colloquialise, the question would be: would the additional height have had such impact on the neighbour (you) that the Planning Permission should have been refused instead of approved.

Antony Moxey said:

Assuming of course that the surveyor would be happy to alter his drawings to help out the architect and client. The surveyor will obviously pass on his drawings to the architect, but he'd still keep his originals for his own records and any possible future works that might be carried out.

The survey drawings are submitted as part of the Planning application, so if you were going to doctor them, you'd need to do so before the application was submitted.

I won't pretend that it doesn't happen: we (architects) know that Planning Authorities have very limited survey capability themselves. Also, they very seldom, if ever, check the accuracy of 'existing' drawings, unless there's something blatant enough that it stands out to them when they make their site visit, so it's certainly possible to bend the truth a bit, at times. If that's the case, you've missed the boat, I'm afraid: if you suspected that the 'existing' drawings were inaccurate, the time to object would have been before the Planning Permission was granted.

As a former Parish Councillor, we scrutinised these quite thoroughly. It was our local knowledge that helped to advise the planning officers. For instance we rejected (well, advised against, we had no power to reject) planning that was squeezing 4 bed town houses, with only I parking space.