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56 commercial property


New laws: new development


opportunities The telegenic governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has assured us that ’renewed recovery is taking hold’, writes John Newton of Lamport Bassitt


The Bank has constructed a platform for recovery based on record low interest rates being pegged to unemployment figures, and loosening capital requirements for the largest lenders.


The Coalition Government has now put in place its main legislative ingredients for recovery, and these have a strong focus on both commercial and residential property development. The next two or three years of the cycle therefore offer a great window of opportunity for landowners, developers and occupiers alike. Rarely in recent times have such political sentiments, economic necessity and legal opportunities all coincided.


The National Planning Policy Framework was one of the first, and most far-reaching, examples of political encouragement for recovery at the grass-roots level. Most significantly, from March 2013, planning authorities must give due weight to their local plans only to the extent they are consistent with the NPPF with its well-known presumption in favour of sustainable development. So inconsistent or out-of-date local plans are now a tremendous area of opportunity and challenge for developers and landowners, particularly where housing allocations are concerned.


The grant of planning permission was often delayed by cumbersome


negotiations over the detailed terms of s106 Agreements which had to be settled on a case-by- case basis, and then in turn approved by banks if they were financing the development. The causes of such delay in many such cases has been removed by the introduction of Community Infrastructure Levy, which is a fixed charge imposed by


reference to the floor area of the development. It is fairer, transparent, and should speed up the grant of planning permission in many cases where previously section 106 Agreements would have been required. The levy is being introduced by local authorities gradually; for example the levy came into effect in Southampton on September 1, 2013.


Once planning permission was granted, developers were then best advised to wait for three months in case objectors sought to have the planning permission quashed by judicial review. That waiting period has now been halved to six weeks for planning permissions granted after July 1, 2013.


Even with planning permission granted, development of land could nevertheless be prevented or delayed for years by objectors claiming the land had been used as “a village green“. Since April 25, 2013, the publication of a planning application or the publication of a draft local plan proposing the development of land will generally preclude anyone applying to register that land as a village green.


It can be seen that in multiple areas of the planning and development process, many long-standing and often frustrating obstacles to the developer and landowner have been reduced or removed altogether. It is up to such developers and landowners, and their advisers, to seize these new opportunities. If the up-and-down cycle of commercial and residential development tells us anything, it is that he who hesitates is lost.


Details: John Newton 023-8083-7742 John.newton@lamportbassitt.co.uk


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County House 17 Friar Street Reading RG1 1DB F: 0118 921 1501 info@haslams.co.uk www.businessmag.co.uk HCS-0000-Business Mag135x188-Sept13-AW.indd 1


THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – OCTOBER 2013 10/09/2013 19:20


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