Hello - Council (policy) planner here. I work for a local authority where there is considerable pressure for new warehousing, including, notably, for strategic scale warehouses. To date I am not aware of any warehousing being permitted/ constructed locally with accompanying (rooftop) solar arrays and we are under pressure to address this. Despite an existing local plan policy which has a hook to facilitate this nothing is happening. We are looking to strengthen this policy in the next local plan but via a literature review am not finding much to go on?
Notwithstanding this I do note that commercial solar is considered permitted development (Class J) as the previous Government removed a threshold which required businesses to apply for permission if their (rooftop) solar panels generated more then 1mw of electricity (the only consideration for businesses now in this respect is the need to apply for (a 56 day) Prior Approval for such installations as per condition J.4 (2) of the General Permitted Development Order 2015 as applies to England). Is anyone using this as a "catch-all" to secure solar in such instances?
On the back of this I was wondering if other authorities are managing to secure Solar on B8 and the policy and/or regulatory hooks being used to do so? Any advice or thoughts on how to secure solar on warehousing would be gratefully received.
