How an Independent Planning Consultant Can Drive Your Application

What do we mean by ‘driving the application’?

As you may well know, you cannot push local planning authorities to go any faster during the decision-making process, and many do their best to meet the statutory determination periods set by the government.

Following validation of a planning application (whereby the application is acknowledged by the Council and assigned a case officer), a decision for a minor application will take up to eight weeks and a more complex, larger or more politically sensitive scheme will take 13 weeks going up to 16 weeks for development requiring an Environmental Statement.

However, if you have a planning consultant working on your behalf, they can save you a huge amount of time, and make the process much smoother and easier to understand.

Here at RCA, our planning consultants can undertake numerous tasks during the planning application process, including:

• Prepare, manage and run public consultation exercises, attending parish meetings and liaising with interested parties before the application is submitted – we can even set up a website for the development and keep the public informed.  We run events as well as postal consultations, at a price to suit all budgets and scales of development.

• If appropriate we can support you during pre-application talks with the council, if we feel it would be helpful.  This is a process that your consultant will be on your side for, and it is the opportunity to discuss in-depth a planning application with council officers before it is submitted, essentially focusing on the chances of success at application stage and the validation requirements (i.e. what do the planners need in terms of report to make the application valid).

• Seeking quotes for, commissioning and collation of all required   technical documents (such as arboricultural surveys, ecological surveys, transport assessments, landscape   appraisals, site investigations, flood risk assessments, air quality/noise assessments and heritage statements).

• Through our expertise and knowledge, we have close working relationships with a huge number of specialists and will be able to commission ‘the best in the business’ to work on your planning application.
  
• The completion of all documentation and certificates; including forms for CIL liability and S106 Heads of Terms.

• We submit all planning applications via the Planning Portal – our consultants are efficient and experienced in using this platform.

• We will closely monitor the application once validated and respond accordingly to any correspondence from the Council, as well as advising you on the best course of action.

• If development viability becomes an issue, we can provide full support to you producing development appraisals and reports to put forward your case in an objective and transparent way, ensuring that your scheme is not unduly held up because of viability issues.

We are committed to offering our clients flexible support and you, the developer, can be as involved in the application process as you like.

Key timesaving

We are very plain speaking: saving you significant time by cutting through all the to-ing and fro-ing and planning jargon and will keep everything moving forward.  We can agree on how frequently we update you, but you can rest assured we will regularly check in on your application as part of our service to you.

RCA can help

Here at RCA Regeneration we know what needs to be covered and included - saving you time, money and hopefully taking some of the stress away!

To talk to our expert and helpful team call 01905 887686 or Email info@rcaregeneration.co.uk