More Outbuilding Planning Permission Woe
Discussion
Reading through the thread about the chap with the outbuilding with no planning permission made me wonder if PH (Hi Equus) could come up with something for our planning issues.
We built a cabin in our garden, went through planning and building regs, all signed-off, happy days.
We put a clause in the planning to make it clear that we were not trying to build a separate dwelling in the garden, something along the lines of 'use ancillary to the main dwelling'. My wife has been teaching yoga from home for five years, and her clients visited her there. More recently we hired the place out for AirBnB (there is a bathroom and a toaster, but no 'kitchen'). Our grumpy neighbour got the hump and said 'you can't do that, its a separate dwelling and I don't like cars driving past my house, so its a nuisance'. Fair enough I thought and applied to the council's 'do I need planning permission?' service.
Turns out that part of the planning department is understaffed and three months behind. So nice neighbour gets enforcement to come round and they give us an enforcement notice telling us we need to vary our planning permission. Despite a few phone calls the enforcement officer can't tell us what we need to change the planning to. We don't want to have it classed as a business premises or a separate dwelling, we have AirBnB every other weekend in term time and the wife teaches yoga for six hours a week tops, but it is all 'ancillary to the use of the house' - we watch movies, have friends over, stick the kids in it after school etc.
We are definitely NOT looking to change it into a separate dwelling or a holiday let. What is the deal with planning? Is there a policy document somewhere about short-term lets / AirBnB? Does the enforcement notice stand if he can't say what part of our permission we are in breach of?
Looking forward to input...
We built a cabin in our garden, went through planning and building regs, all signed-off, happy days.
We put a clause in the planning to make it clear that we were not trying to build a separate dwelling in the garden, something along the lines of 'use ancillary to the main dwelling'. My wife has been teaching yoga from home for five years, and her clients visited her there. More recently we hired the place out for AirBnB (there is a bathroom and a toaster, but no 'kitchen'). Our grumpy neighbour got the hump and said 'you can't do that, its a separate dwelling and I don't like cars driving past my house, so its a nuisance'. Fair enough I thought and applied to the council's 'do I need planning permission?' service.
Turns out that part of the planning department is understaffed and three months behind. So nice neighbour gets enforcement to come round and they give us an enforcement notice telling us we need to vary our planning permission. Despite a few phone calls the enforcement officer can't tell us what we need to change the planning to. We don't want to have it classed as a business premises or a separate dwelling, we have AirBnB every other weekend in term time and the wife teaches yoga for six hours a week tops, but it is all 'ancillary to the use of the house' - we watch movies, have friends over, stick the kids in it after school etc.
We are definitely NOT looking to change it into a separate dwelling or a holiday let. What is the deal with planning? Is there a policy document somewhere about short-term lets / AirBnB? Does the enforcement notice stand if he can't say what part of our permission we are in breach of?
Looking forward to input...
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