Once again, the pre-Christmas rush has me racing around like a headless turkey. There is the predictable cacophony of requests to 'do it before the holidays' or downright orders like 'we want to start on site at New Year' and even 'I suppose you are having the WHOLE of Christmas off?'
To these I answer: no, tough, and yes I bloody well am.
Mince pies, obscene amounts of ginger wine and lots of telly with a warm cat on my knee, here I come.
21 December 2008
13 December 2008
Nuts
For most of my career, which is longer than I like to recall, I have been fighting the labyrinthine and convoluted planning system on behalf of my clients. As you know, dear reader, most of Alice’s jobs consist of small extensions and alterations to existing buildings, mainly for the people who are going to live and work in them and want something to make their lives a bit easier, their buildings look better or their businesses to prosper. In a sane society, a planning system (if it existed at all, as the words ‘planning’ and ‘sane’ do not appear to compliment each other) would be a simple question and answer, going something like this:
Alice: ‘Dear Planning Officer, can I build this minute and insignificant building/extension/alteration here?’ (Alice attaches drawings).
Mr Planner: ‘Have you notified the neighbours’?
Alice: ‘Yes’
Mr Planner: ‘Do any of the immediate neighbours object?’
Alice: ‘No’
Mr Planner: ‘Is nit picking the fine details of the project in the public interest?’
Alice: ‘No.’
Mr Planner ‘Is the building listed?’
Alice ‘No’
Mr Planner ‘Go ahead with our blessing. Next!’
Notice I have made no reference to silly and badly informed comments about design or good taste, which planners know little about; no requests for the positions of every tree on the site and the neighbour’s gardens, no requests for Design and Access statements, no finicky requests for the size of bricks to the nearest fraction of a millimetre, the position of door knobs, or whether the whole thing should be moved four inches to the left. There are no woolly phrases used in refusals such as ‘not in keeping with the existing building’ (why should it be in keeping? Isn’t that the choice of the owner?) or ‘Must be subservient to the existing building in accordance with the policy HMO/009856352/F/2008 (please see document which we will charge you £4.50 to photocopy and isn’t on the website)’ and no reference to things completely outside planning and into the realm of structural engineering, building regulations, interior design or gardening. All these are often necessary to submit a simple application for a tiny, single storey extension to house a new loo.
One of the sillier hoops I have to jump through involves the Design and Access statement. This is worthy of the film ‘Brazil’ where beaurocracy proliferates at the expense of common sense. If a house is in a conservation area, a Design and Access statement must be submitted along with the application. I used to give a brief explanation of how I arrived at the design in my covering letter, but now it has to be in a separate document and cover landscape, setting, appearance, scale and how difficult or easy it is to reach by bus, and whether or not someone in a wheelchair can get in and use the loo in question. Never mind that the building already exists and most of these requests become superfluous and ridiculous. The whole thing was shown up recently for the idiocy it is by Carlisle Jessop http://www.carlislejessop.co.uk/ in their design for a new agricultural shed. It went around the various archi-blogs, and then into the mainstream press. You can read it here.
Recently, the government announced it is going to ‘streamline’ the planning system. Well, I remember that the last ‘streamlining’, much trumpeted by the government, lead directly to such paper pushing nonsense as the Design and Access Statement. I wait with baited breath to see what happens next, but I can be absolutely sure it will mean another forest’s worth of trees being pulped in order to provide yet more irrelevant and nonsensical documents.
Part of the 'Five A Day' series inspired by Which End Bites
Alice: ‘Dear Planning Officer, can I build this minute and insignificant building/extension/alteration here?’ (Alice attaches drawings).
Mr Planner: ‘Have you notified the neighbours’?
Alice: ‘Yes’
Mr Planner: ‘Do any of the immediate neighbours object?’
Alice: ‘No’
Mr Planner: ‘Is nit picking the fine details of the project in the public interest?’
Alice: ‘No.’
Mr Planner ‘Is the building listed?’
Alice ‘No’
Mr Planner ‘Go ahead with our blessing. Next!’
Notice I have made no reference to silly and badly informed comments about design or good taste, which planners know little about; no requests for the positions of every tree on the site and the neighbour’s gardens, no requests for Design and Access statements, no finicky requests for the size of bricks to the nearest fraction of a millimetre, the position of door knobs, or whether the whole thing should be moved four inches to the left. There are no woolly phrases used in refusals such as ‘not in keeping with the existing building’ (why should it be in keeping? Isn’t that the choice of the owner?) or ‘Must be subservient to the existing building in accordance with the policy HMO/009856352/F/2008 (please see document which we will charge you £4.50 to photocopy and isn’t on the website)’ and no reference to things completely outside planning and into the realm of structural engineering, building regulations, interior design or gardening. All these are often necessary to submit a simple application for a tiny, single storey extension to house a new loo.
One of the sillier hoops I have to jump through involves the Design and Access statement. This is worthy of the film ‘Brazil’ where beaurocracy proliferates at the expense of common sense. If a house is in a conservation area, a Design and Access statement must be submitted along with the application. I used to give a brief explanation of how I arrived at the design in my covering letter, but now it has to be in a separate document and cover landscape, setting, appearance, scale and how difficult or easy it is to reach by bus, and whether or not someone in a wheelchair can get in and use the loo in question. Never mind that the building already exists and most of these requests become superfluous and ridiculous. The whole thing was shown up recently for the idiocy it is by Carlisle Jessop http://www.carlislejessop.co.uk/ in their design for a new agricultural shed. It went around the various archi-blogs, and then into the mainstream press. You can read it here.
Recently, the government announced it is going to ‘streamline’ the planning system. Well, I remember that the last ‘streamlining’, much trumpeted by the government, lead directly to such paper pushing nonsense as the Design and Access Statement. I wait with baited breath to see what happens next, but I can be absolutely sure it will mean another forest’s worth of trees being pulped in order to provide yet more irrelevant and nonsensical documents.
Part of the 'Five A Day' series inspired by Which End Bites
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