Lodging a complaint after planning permission granted and work completed

A relative has recently completed a house extension, done with full planning permission and no deviation from the approved plans. Her immediate neighbours, who were consulted throughout and who replied to the council's initial notification letter with "We have no objections", have now changed their minds and apparently complained to the planning department about issues over blocked light and lost privacy. My relative learned this from her neighbours - she's not had any word from the council on the subject.

What happens in cases like this? Surely key issues like privacy would have been considered by the council and permission refused if the neighbour's rights were going to be violated in any way.

Reply to
Bert Coules
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As Phil said, the planning permission won't/can't be ungranted. If the building doesn't correspond with the details and drawings in the application then it might be judged to be built without permission. The neighbour could have a complaint against the Council if they have failed to follow the law or their own policies and procedures. But if the permission was granted it's too late to object.

TW

Reply to
TimW

Wouldn't the complaint then be against the builder, for not accurately following the plans? Or would the council be at fault for not noticing that?

Reply to
Bert Coules

The council is never at fault.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

You said "done with full planning permission and no deviation from the approved plans." If there was significant deviation, the whole thing might have to come down. More likely, some alteration works.

Reply to
GB

I should perhaps have said "no deviation... as far as my relative knows and has been able to determine". Wouldn't the regular building control inspections have picked up anything significant?

Reply to
Bert Coules

Building control is separate from Planning.

Reply to
GB

I think they are on a hiding to nothing. Once planning is granted you can't complain any more to the council, unless they have failed to satisfy the planning restrictions granted to them

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

As I realised the moment I pressed "send"...

Reply to
Bert Coules

Nope. Building control is there to ensure a safe warm dry habitations is built. Not to enforce planning law in terms of WHAT is built.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

First off it would depend on the council what action they took (if any). A lot of them have very small and underfunded enforcement depts. If the building is not what was granted permission they might just do nothing (in which case you have won),and they might at most invite you to apply for permission retrospectively.

if after a retrospective application and the inevitable appeal process you still don't have planning permission they might begin to take legal action with the ultimate sanction of making you demolish or rebuild but this is very, very rare, especially with stuff like domestic extensions. They are much more likely just to leave you as the owner of an 'unlawful development' which won't be worth what it might have been, but you might not care.

The contract between the homeowner and the builder would be a totally separate affair.

TW

Reply to
TimW

Yes. In our old village a builder bought a plot and got PP for a four bedroom house. He built it with seven.

He then sold it, with the buyer knowing that there would be an outstanding planning issue. At that point, the builder was completely off the hook, and out of the picture (he apparently had form in a number of jurisdictions for doing this).

Once he sold the house, he's no longer part of the planning dispute, which then continued between the council and the purchaser.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Yes I'm afraid they had plenty of time to moan before. I strongly suspect that they now want to sell the property and have been told by the estate agent that the presence of the next door light restricting structure now devalues the house and they want to have a whinge. As you say, this is why you should get somebody competent to view plans for this sort of problem, before its been built. I'd suggest that no council will do anything about such complaints other than point out what I've just said. On the other hand if the complaint was, for example that some kind of damage to a patio, or structure of a neighbouring property had been done, then the insurers of the building firm can often sort such things out, assuming they are not idiots its in their interests to keep everyone happy. Next door to me caused problems with my roof due to inner and outer wall removal, so they fixed the roof for nothing. It was only minor settling which cracked the fillets etc after all.

One of the main complaints that can come out of such work is noise and dust during the work, and often damage to garden and expensive plants that have been there for years. These are hard to put a price on.

Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

This arises when people are too thick/can't be bothered to understand plans. Too late for any objection now.

Reply to
harry

I can believe it. I saw one recently where the plans had been submitted with the scale fudged, so it looked like a little house in a big plot but when it was built it was massive!

Round here the the District council just do what they want, often with a very casual attitude, not normally nasty but inconsistent, often letting people off the hook who should be brought to book, and nobody holds the Council to account. It doesn't help that it's a rural area, Conservative since Disraeli's time so there is no democratic accountability at all, just cronyism, who you know, landowners and golf club pals.

I do a bit of work for some rural conservation groups and we are often struggling to make the Planning dept just follow the law and their own policies and procedures.

TW

Reply to
TimW

To the best of my knowledge, lost light is a civil matter, quite unconnected with Planning Permission.

However, the neighbours cannot get the concil to go back on a Plnning Permission grant with out getting the courts involved. And it's probably too late for that.

Reply to
charles

Examine the neighbour's deeds. His right to light may be specifically excluded.

I looked at the Land Registry entry after I bought my previous house. It was on land that had been sold off by the local landowner years earlier. When it was sold (to an owner or two before me), the rights to light were reserved to the landowner, with a clause saying that restriction had to be passed on to subsequent owners.

What it meant, in effect, was that if the landowner got PP to build a block of flats on land he still owned, adjacent to mine, I couldn't then complain because his block was shading my garden.

Reply to
Tim Streater

I came across this interesting way of preventing a neighbour claiming lights (or blocking his neighbour's view, I don't know which came first) on the street where I was brought up.

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side view

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The householder built his boundary wall rising rather high, complete with chimney!

Chris

Reply to
Chris J Dixon

In message , Tim Streater writes

IANAL I think right to light written in deeds of sale only lasts (in perpetuity) usually taken as 80 years.

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Reply to
Tim Lamb

In article , charles writes

The council have probably thrown it in the bin.

Reply to
bert

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