Re: Planning Unit and residential use - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

There is no change of use. This is as much to do with land law as it is with the planning niceties. Get the property + its land registered if it is not already and make sure conveyance includes rights of vehicular access if it relies on access via convalescent home.

See Planning Lawyer Martin Goodall's comment on this issue. If the use of the property has always been ancillary to the convalescent home then it does not form a separate planning unit whatever the definition of 'curtilege' in land law. As always apply the primary purpose test. Quote 'In two separate cases recently, involving different authorities, I have had to deal with misunderstandings on the part of planning officers regarding the concept of a building’s ‘curtilage’. There seems to be a rather widespread ignorance of planning law in this regard. The lawful use of a property (whatever it is) extends to the whole of the ‘planning unit’ (i.e. the unit of occupation, unless or until any part of it can be identified as being physically and functionally separate from the whole). With this one exception, the planning unit in the case of a single private dwellinghouse is undoubtedly the whole of the land occupied with the house, and the lawful use of the whole of that planning unit falls within Use Class C3 in the Use Classes Order (namely use as a single private dwellinghouse). Where planning officers seem to get confused is in relation to the concept of the domestic ‘curtilage’. The first point which it is important to grasp is that the ‘curtilage’ (or the ‘residential curtilage’) of a property does not represent a use of land for planning purposes. You cannot change the use of land to use ‘as residential curtilage’. If land not forming part of the original planning unit is incorporated within that planning unit (for example, a house and the land enjoyed with it for domestic purposes), in other words if its use is changed from (say) agricultural use to domestic use, then that represents a material change of use of that land, but it makes no difference whether the area of land in question was incorporated in what can be described as the ‘residential curtilage’ of the house; what matters is whether it has been incorporated in the planning unit so as to change its use to domestic use. The second point to bear in mind (as you may appreciate from what I have already written above) is that the ‘domestic curtilage’ of a house is not necessarily co-extensive with the planning unit. This particularly applies to large houses in the countryside, where the ‘curtilage’ may extend only to the cultivated garden, plus the forecourt immediately in front of the house, etc. However, other land within the planning unit which is not so directly related to the house may in fact fall outside the domestic curtilage. As I have pointed out above, this makes no difference in terms of the lawful use of the land. The only significance of the definition of the curtilage for planning purposes is that certain permitted development rights for operational development (outbuildings, extensions and certain other structures) apply within the curtilage of a single private dwellinghouse, but not to any land within the same planning unit which falls outside the curtilage. Planning officers sometimes seem to get hung up with the definition of the ‘curtilage’ when considering questions of lawful use (as distinct from permitted development rights, which are an entirely separate issue), but I really must stress that this is of no relevance in relation to the lawful use of any part of the property. In the vast majority of cases, the whole of a domestic property will constitute a single planning unit, so that the lawful use of the whole of the property will be use as a single private dwellinghouse within Use Class C3 of the Use Classes Order, and this necessarily includes the whole of the land enjoyed with it for domestic purposes, whether it falls inside or outside the slightly narrower definition of ‘residential curtilage’.

I have an outbuilding brick and slate roof, which is some 12 metres from my house. Originally the house was a farm house with an agricultural occupation condition. The outbuilding was used for housing farm equipment originally. The agricultural occupation condition got lifted many years ago. For the last 10 years we have used it for storage, kids play in it, and also a utility room with freezer, tumble dryer etc. I have read the various bits of legislation, including Part E of the Permitted Development information, and it seems that my case may be a little unique as the measurements of this outbuilding are slightly outside the height restrictions etc. But, it was built with the house and is many years old. I think the outbuilding was without doubt constructed for incidental purposes, and has definitely been used as such for many years. There is no doubt about it being in the curtiledge of my house. I have read many bits of information, including the appeal with South Cambs District Council in which the court stated that "if the building had been constructed for incidental purposes, planning permission was not required for a later change provided the building remained within the same planning unit. And..an existing curtiledge building could now be altered internally to include primary living accommodation such as a kitchen, bedrooms, provided it remained part of the main planning unit as the main house. What does the same planning unit mean? What does independent premises mean? Can I put bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens in it?