Agricultural buildings and rural workers dwellings

Berrybrook Farm, Sedgehill, Wiltshire

In January 2024, Vision Planning obtained planning permission for a client to turn an agricultural barn into a dwelling, under Class Q of the General Permitted Development Order (GPDO).

The GPDO is a document that grants automatic planning permission for a list of developments. This is known as “permitted development”, and it is this process that allows people to put up sheds etc in their back garden (subject to some restrictions), for example.

In some cases, including with a Class Q application, the Council has a say in whether or not the proposal is permitted development, and they do this via what is known as a prior notification process.

Where a prior notification is submitted, the Council can conclude that their prior approval is needed, and they can refuse that prior approval. This is what happened with the Berrybrook Farm Class Q.

However, the matters that the Council can consider in relation to these prior notifications is limited, and in some cases, they stray beyond those limits. In other cases, they can come to the wrong conclusion about the matters they can consider.

At Berrybrook Farm, Wiltshire Council did both of the above, so we appealed on behalf of the landowner, and the appeal was successful.

This means that the appeal Inspector has confirmed that the barn can be converted to a dwelling.