THE PLANNING STORY

The route to obtaining planning permission for an agricultural dwelling is long, frustrating and expensive. We had hired an Agricultural Consultants to deal with the business planning and a Planning Consultant for the planning side of things.

http://www.newlandowner.co.uk/

http://heatonplanning.co.uk/

We never imagined that to get planning permission in the open countryside for a new residential dwelling was going to be easy, but boy do you have to jump through hoops to prove your intentions are genuine.
The main part to the planning process was satisfying the Financial and Functional Test which is what is says it is. To obtain permission you need to be running, or intending to run, an agricultural business that is financially viable and you also need to have a functional need to be on the site. So financially the holding needs to support one full time worker in both time spent and annual wages. It's open to debate what exactly these are but we worrked on about 40 hours per week and wages of £18,000.
The council used there own consultant to assess our application and business plan, which don't forget had been put together by NewLandOwner who are experienced farmers themselves and have seen and helped many smallholdings like ours.
The council consultant judged that our business plan was not financial viable. He had used systems to assess the plan that are used for large automated farms where one man is able to look after lots of animals due to the systems used. We and NewLandOwner argued that a manual smallholding where no machinery is used could not be assessed in the same way but to no avail. After lots of correspondence we finally withdrew the application so we could reassess our position. We reapplied including our alpaca business in the plan. We had intended to breed alpacas later on after we had obtained planning permission due to the high cost of a starter herd however our hand was forced due to fact that the council refused to see our side and seemed intent on stopping our application. As far as we all could see we had covered all bases and done lots of research on other similar applications. We had spent thousands of pounds not only on the land in the first place but fencing, animal housing, livestock not to mention the consultants fees. They couldn't doubt we were serious, could they and that we were not speculators trying our luck. We really did want to work and needed to live in the countryside.
To cut a very long story short the application was refused by the planning officer, though it did take several frustrating months for him to come to that conclusion. So, we immediately made our appeal, which ended up being an informal hearing. I attended this hearing with "an army" of people. Two from the planning consultants, two from NewLandOwner and two the alpaca breeder where we have bought our herd from. Seven against two, we couldn't loose!
After a fairly intense morning of questions came the site visit. The inspector needed to see that we were actually keeping livestock and running a business. He couldn't fail to see that we were doing that.
After that we just had to wait for his decision, which could take up to eight weeks. But within a week we had it. YES YES YES we had won. We could hardly believe it. All the hard work and stress had been worth it and we could now really get down to business and not worry about planning details every day.
Basically, if you're serious about working and living in the countryside do your homework, expect plenty of knock backs and get the right help. Consultants might seem expensive but the right ones are worth their weight in gold. Don't give up and remember if it was easy everyone would be at it. You need to made of tough stuff to start a new countryside business and apply for planning permission all at the same time.