Adding storeys under PD

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I was quite surprised to read recently that adding storeys to a house can be done under permitted development. The list of things one must adhere to also seems fairly lax, perhaps the most difficult one being "must make a successful prior approval application".

It seems like a fairly simple way to massively extend a house (a two storey house can be doubled to four storeys?!), subject to technicalities like foundation strength, without impinging on the garden space around it but only know of one house locally that was extended upwards; building a house around an existing bungalow then demolishing the bungalow seems more common.

As an operation, are you guys aware of it being done often? Are the challenges administrative (councils object for spurious reasons) or physical (foundations usually need underpinning
etc)? Is it one of those things that, on the face of it, seems like a good idea but brings with it a raft of challenges that are just too hard compared to gobbling or demo/rebuild?
 
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Seeing lots of Flats getting an extra floor and I am currently looking at a roof lift for my current house, as I want to extend and maintain a south facing roof for solar.
 
The flats won't be PD though, right? Are you doing your work under PD?

My brother has long said that any house that suffers repeated flooding events should have an automatic permission to extend it upwards, take all the living accommodation off the ground floor, lift everything up one, turn the ground floor into a garage then next time it floods all that needs replacing is the car and the crap in the garage. Seems like a reasonable point if we're going to keep building on floodplains
 
Theoretically, you can add a storey to a block of flats under PD, but not an individual flat. In practice, there are so many caveats, that I wonder if it's ever actually been implemented.
 
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I wondered about that, because I have the upstairs flat of a semi house that was converted to two flats (upstairs and downstairs), but when I read on planning portal:

The current house:

  • Is not a building containing one or more flats, or a flat contained within such a building
..I thought that was the excluding factor for flats?
 
Its only available for properties built between certain years - I think between 1947 and sometime in the 1970s, but i might be wrong.
I doubt you'd be able to build one on your 3-bed 1930s semi in Acacia Avenue.
 
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Its only available for properties built between certain years - I think between 1947 and sometime in the 1970s, but i might be wrong.
I doubt you'd be able to build one on your 3-bed 1930s semi in Acacia Avenue.
Really? I didn't see that gem
 
Date range is a bit wider than that it seems- "not permitted if ... c)the building was constructed before 1st July 1948, or after 5th March 2018"

Also, it looks like the planning portal is summarising part 1, but extending a block of proper flats is part 20 which clears up my confusion.
 
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Hopefully, when Street Votes gets through Parliament, we'll see more of this via PD. Make friends with your neighbours!
 

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