Planning Success in the London Borough of Hillingdon… For a Rural Worker’s Dwelling…

Permission was received this week on a farm within the Metropolitan Green Belt for second dwelling which will facilitate generational succession within an existing farm enterprise.

Rural Worker’s Dwellings – dwellings for farm workers set within the open countryside – are always a challenge and require clear and reasoned justification. There needs to be both an essential need for the dwelling together with a functional need. Paragraph 80(a) of the NPPF states that “Planning policies and decisions should avoid the development of isolated homes in the countryside unless… [inter alia] there is an essential need for a rural worker, including those taking majority control of a farm business to live permanently at or near their place of work in the countryside.”

Demonstration of this requires a comprehensive and detailed understanding of both planning AND agriculture…

Luckily yours truly is a master of both… (Literally… I’ve got a Masters degree and everything!)

Once we’d informed our rather urban Planning Officer what a Rural Worker’s Dwelling was, pointed them to the relevant policy within the NPPF (strangely Hillingdon’s Local Development Plan is eerily silent when it came to agricultural development), shown him a few cows, some gross margins, accounts, a full report on why the farm enterprise warranted a secondary dwelling, some more cows, and how to tell the difference between cows which are small and those which are far away, the game was ours…