Planning condition not met - buying house

[Neese]

I've been reading quite a lot on here lately, hopefully it's ok to ask for some advice! We are in the process of buying a recently converted property (just over a year old).

We've noticed in the grant of conditional planning permission notes that the second planning condition states 'before any of the development herby permitted is brought into use, parking and turning areas for the two dwellings shall be laid out and constructed in accordance with the approved drawing and the said areas shall not thereafter be obstructed or used for any other purpose.'

We haven't seen any documents removing this planning condition and there is only one of the two parking space on site, the missing one being the one for the property we are buying. What does this mean for the sale? Can the council still enforce this? I'd appreciate any advice. Thanks

 

[tony1851]

Have a look at this link;

http://www.eversheds.com/global/en/...estate_planning/Conditions_precedent_24july09

 

[cjard]

Note that the article tony linked talks about Whitley where LJ Woolff places heavy emphasis on differences in the wording.. This article predates a more recent case in the court of appeal (greyfort) where it was not so much the wording but the intent of the condition that made it a condition precedent (i.e. things got harder to decide than before)

For comemntary on the case see these 2:
http://planninglawblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/conditions-precedent-important.html
http://planninglawblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/conditions-precedent-further-thought.html

Whether anything serious would come of it in your case would rather depend on two factors:

one whether the implementation of the condition was core to the granting of the planning and
two whether its lack of implementation is serious enough to make it in the public interest to pursue

There isn't a hard and fast rule for the former, because the circumstances under which the application were granted and how it relates to local development policy and the decision to grant must be considered. The two questions are possibly linked anyway - in your case it might well be that yes, there is only one parking space instead of two but this doesn't necesarily take the development as a whole massively outside the scope of the original permission, especially if there were a lot of other conditions that were complied with, adequate parking is available near by, it's become a sustainable location through additional bus routes.. yada yada


End of it all, you're buying a house, right? Probably noone will ever care about this in the real world, but you can use it to your advantage by bargaining a lower price because you'll have to add that parking space yourself (and youre allowed to satisfy the condition and make your permission technically lawful)..