The Government has announced (9 September) that a consolidated version of the Town and Country Planning (General Development Procedure) Order 1995 will come into effect on 1 October, newly entitled as the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) Order 2010.
Apart from a general consolidation of all of the changes to the old GDPO since 1995, the new Order includes an important new procedure for obtaining new time limits in relation to outline planning permissions, which have been partly implemented in phases.
Article 18 of the new Development Management Procedure Order allows applications for a replacement planning permission subject to a new time limit for schemes where:
- the original development permitted was clearly intended, at the time of the initial decision, to be implemented in phases; and
- one or more of those phases has commenced.
This only applies to outline planning permissions which are implemented in phases. The new procedure will allow a local planning authority to grant a replacement outline planning permission, and to revise the timetable for the submission of reserved matters and implementation of unimplemented phases, without the need for the submission of a new planning application. Any new permission granted would be similar to a new outline planning permission, and would also set out time limits for the submission of reserved matters.
It will not be necessary for applicants to re-submit reserved matters if they have already been approved, as long as both the LPA and the applicant remain content with the approved details. However, the LPA may make a request that the applicant re-submits reserved matters in order to ensure that the scheme is still acceptable in the light of new policies, or the applicant may choose to re-submit reserved matters applications in order to make some other change.
Significantly, if the date for submission of reserved matters on the original permission has passed without reserved matters applications being submitted to the Local Planning Authority, then the new procedure cannot be used to apply for a replacement planning permission.
The combination of this new procedure with the flexibility for planning permissions already established in November 2009 now means that a procedure for applying for a grant of replacement planning permission subject to a new time limit exists in relation to two different situations:
(1) Where a planning permission (outline or full) was granted on or before 1 October 2009, time limits imposed by conditions have not expired, and the development has not yet begun; and
(2) Where an outline planning permission was granted on or before 1 October 2009, time limits imposed by planning conditions have not expired, the outline planning permission was expressly intended to be implemented in phases, and the development has begun in accordance with the terms of any reserved matters approved.
It will not be possible to take advantage of the new Article 18 procedure for phased outline permissions in the case of permissions where relevant time limits expire before 1 October 2010.
This article was written for Law-Now, CMS Cameron McKenna's free online information service. To register for Law-Now, please go to www.law-now.com/law-now/mondaq
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The original publication date for this article was 10/09/2010.
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