Here Tristan, from ZebraInvest, is at PPN Ipswich presenting a live case study – converting a commercial building to residential located in the National Park of the Broads Authority.
In this sixth part of a 7 episode series, Tristan runs through the challenges of achieving planning permission Riverbank Vista. With a tight deadline looming for using Class O – ZebraInvest worked with RS Studio in Southampton to turn around a fall back position of 6 flats.
I kind of briefly touched on the steps and challengs of planning earlier and but the main bit with this one was and it hopefully it’s about to be changed a little bit but with um class Ma just to give you a brief highlight class ma doesn’t work in national parks and this
Whil it’s just around the corner from norch it’s in the broads Authority so the broads Authority means that class ma wasn’t going to work so we had to get the quickest application in possible under classo to conver it from commercial to residential so and our deadline was the 31st of July which bear
In mind I’d seen it in May didn’t give us much time to get all the surveys Under the Sun that you need to put together and so we our first application may have not been the best one but it definitely tick the box and got us in
So when it comes down to classo it had slightly different um criteria to what it has in class but quite few had been introduced by the time I got around to using it so I can briefly read what they say on the top of it but if it’s on a
Dangerous site so if you got this area where it’s explosives or where you’ve got something that’s say for example an old RAF site probably not going to be the one for converting it but if you’ve got you come down you’ve got Heritage buildings on there again they don’t want
You converting Bank of England into flats that be good idea um they you know statues and monuments and then there can be things that called special sites of signicant an interest and there’s various bits you have to go through and they don’t want you to develop on those
Kind of makes sense um one of the bits I was going to ask and check is your transport so this depends on where you are because in uh on this planning policy on this one that we apply for we basically someone said well look at the
Moment you can have 30 staff coming in and out this and where’s all their parking we only have roughly three St four parking spaces so I item and said well actually if we only have three people we only have six people families living here or living here that’s a lot
Less cars yeah we like that um there’s also if you’ve got bus stops near you as well there’s something called ptal rating I’m not sure if they use it around here but if you’ve got close to bus stops if you’re close to bike high if you’re close to the city center then
Your dependence on transport tends to change but it’ll be borrow by borrow Council by counsel as to how they want to deal with it and the other B is you can’t have a project in a flood zone which on this one was a fun one because I’m next to a
River so how you get away with that is if you Mo no one side of it by the road and the other side of it’s by the river so what I argued was I said well I think this permitted development Works based on the height of the ground floor not
The lower floor and so and they’re like well yes so we put in a rush application and we said well there there hasn’t been flooding on the road ever and then they like good point well we’ll let you have that one um and then they then added in which
Made it more more fun for us is Windows as I said earlier you need Windows everywhere um so windows we then had to make sure that we added extra windows but that limited what we can put into the building for the time being and then space standards that all of our even
Even Studios we still had to have 40 square met Studio because there isn’t as smallest size available for Studios so and the prior approval process you basically have to descri a description of what you’re trying to achieve this would be def by power um and you have to put in a floor plan
With the whole building which you didn’t used to you could pretty much before just drawing and say we’re going to convert this into nine Flats say yay that’s fine but now you actually have to draw it and say what’s going in um you have to give them existing elevations of
Proposed but technically under new legislation you can only give them the existing if you’re going to change them it has to be a supplementary application and the landlord uh sorry the local planning Authority might request transport impact flood risk assess Ms which I did um and impact of daylight so
If you’ve got like a neighbor next door to you if you’re going to convert this building is it going to have any impact next door if you’re not going up if you’re not going out it shouldn’t be changing any more impact to what the existing building’s got
Um and the only limit and a bit of a pain and bum is you have three years to complete it so I’ve got to complete this um next year at the latest so and the process is you can’t no external external arangements allow anyway and then class came in beautiful but it’s
Beautiful for you guys because you can use it it was awful for me because it meant I had a timeline to work on but I figured I’ll check it in because it’s useful you can go off and do any projects at the moment and the other projects I’ve been applying for doing
We’ve been doing under class ma um so class ma is anything in use Class E anyone know what that is I can just talk at you longer that’s fine um so Class E is typically going to be something like a shop it could be Financial Services it could be a state
Agents hairdresses it could be restaurant um it could be offices and any of those at the moment and also light um industrial and they can be converted over to residential um in nor we’ve got a article 4 area for for offices to residential and it just literally limits offices in part of
Class E to residential but interestingly enough they didn’t close their loophole for class G so you can still convert those buildings anyway so it allows you to convert up to 1500 square meters of a building into residential so if you’ve got a huge building you might want to just leave
The downstairs as resent as commercial and then the upstairs and then you can have depends of different parts of the city but you can do the whole building parts of the building um you can just do the ground floor if you’ve already got the upstairs converted on one that we’ve
Just done we’ve actually just converted the old restaurant’s kitchen into a bedroom and we put a hallway in through that so you don’t have to convert the whole space and that also really helped for conservation areas which we were in at the same time but Article 4 there’s
Only in a few areas but you can literally just Google it you can type in the area you’re in article 4 class and made and you’ll see if something pops up and usually it’s just on certain buildings but it’s quite interesting because if it’s only on offices and it’s
In some other class use you’ll be able to change it