My wife and I are just starting our first off-grid conversion project on an old building in Scotland. I wanted to do my own planning permission and building warrant for reasons of saving on expenditure and the self-satisfaction, and since I’ll be doing all the renovation work. I put in pre-application advice for planning, but have only been e-mailing for pre-submission advice from Buidling Standards (warrant) because I wanted to be sure that I didn’t get the submission rejected. It is a very small project. Can someone please advise on the following:
1. Are all Building Warrant ‘verifiers’ the same, and how does one deal with them? They don’t help. I ask questions, and they drip feed information. They won’t tell me what I should do, but are free to tell me what I shouldn’t do. They give negative responses which I believe are wrong according to the Building Standards Technical Handbook and when I ask them to verify which part of the standards they refer to when making this decision they don’t respond. Or is it just that I have got a bad verifier? I honestly believe that he doesn’t know.
2. Based on 1, it is a big puzzle to me when to actually submit both planning and warrant applications. This is because the two are inter-connected. Planning tell me (in their pre-planning advice – which I paid £140 for) that their decision is based on what I might have to change to comply with building warrant, but (as above) building warrant are at worst obstructive. So, do I first submit building warrant and get this accepted, but taking the risk that Planning might reject it, or do I submit both simultaneously and do we then go back and forth with negotiation until the plans are mutually acceptable to all parties?
3. Over the years, a couple of people have told me to never contact Planning, but rather wait until they come to you. I wanted to do the right thing, but form recent experience this seems to be good advice. Any opinions?
Thanks,
Neil
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