Approval without the Hassle

We’ve provided planning consultancy to clients for a range of projects over the last decade – so far with exceptional levels of success. Our observatory planning permission service dovetails perfectly with our design service, ensuring that any delay in realising your observatory is minimised. As your agent, we submit your planning application with all the required drawings and documentation, negotiate with planners on your behalf, and manage the application through to approval, keeping you updated with progress throughout.

Our main message to you is that getting planning permission for your observatory really isn’t as hard as most people think: planning applications are rarely unreasonably refused, and astronomical observatories (if well-designed) are rarely objectionable in any case.

Our Observatory Planning Permission Service

The ‘trick’ to getting planning approval for your observatory really isn’t a trick at all – it’s all about ensuring that the design complies with local and national policy, is suitable for and sympathetic to the environment it will exist in, and takes account of any constraints to the site.

A well-crafted planning application will serve to demonstrate compliance, head off potential objections, and preclude unnecessary approval conditions by ensuring factors such as tree protection, environmental effects, drainage and materials are all explicitly dealt with in advance. As a result our comprehensive service will submit your application with:

  • A full set of scaled plans, sections and elevations with all required annotations, scale bars etc.
  • Statutory location and block plans at the required scales
  • A comprehensive planning statement, covering:
    • Site planning history and context
    • Full design and access statement, including details of finish materials
    • Relevant Local Plan and national (NPPF) policies, demonstrating compliance
    • Flood risk mapping and any required mitigations
    • Tree plans and details of tree protection measures
    • Measures related to protection of designated sites, where appropriate
  • Any other required surveys
  • Supporting photographs, 3D views and photorealistic renders as appropriate.

What to Expect

Our planning service runs alongside our usual design service – indeed the same 3D CAD model we design for the plans we provide to you is also used to produce the drawings we send to the planners. Generally, producing the comprehensive package of planning materials takes up to 14 days, but it may take more time if specialist professional surveys are required.

Approval can often be obtained within the statutory eight weeks, but our experience with planners in recent years is that they will ask for extra time on about 30% of applications, and it is usually wise to approve their request. So it is best to allow up to 16 weeks to get an answer, though in many cases it will be faster.

Once your application is approved, we can usually start manufacturing your observatory fairly quickly, and this takes 3-6 weeks depending on complexity.

First, check out our article on “Permitted Development” (PD) – which is a set of criteria under which most observatories are allowed to be built without applying for planning permission.

If your observatory is outside the criteria for PD – perhaps it isn’t being built in the garden of a single dwelling house, or it’s over-height, or perhaps it’s to the side of a house in a conservation area, etc., etc., then you WILL need planning permission. There’s a rumour (once peddled by another observatory company) that observatories are considered ‘temporary buildings’, but this simply isn’t the case – in fact there’s no such thing as a temporary building in planning law. Unless your observatory is on wheels, it will need planning permission, if it doesn’t meet the PD criteria.

Even if your observatory does meet PD, you may wish to apply for a “certificate of lawfulness”. This is confirmation from the local authority that the observatory qualifies under PD and is therefore lawful. It’s not necessary to have such a certificate though.

Good question! It will take us about two weeks to prepare and submit the planning package, and your local authority will need up to 8 weeks to approve it if there are no delays, so a minimum of 10 weeks is expected before work can begin. However, increasingly, local authorities under pressure are asking for Extensions of Time (EoT) which can increase this by quite a lot.

That said, observatories are relatively simple small-scale applications which can usually be approved directly by planning officers without having to be presented to a committee of councillors (under what’s called ‘delegated authority’) and we try to point this out to local authorities, so they might consider it a ‘quick win’ to review and approve on time, improving their statistics! No promises can be made though!

We generally charge £960 including VAT to prepare the planning documents and submit them for a straightforward observatory on a domestic site. This includes certain statutory plans we pay for, as well as the time taken to prepare the required drawings, write the application and produce a comprehensive planning statement justifying it. Finally, it includes the planning submission fee which is currently just under £300.

For larger observatories, and those which will be installed in environmentally sensitive areas or in designated areas (AONBs, AGLVs, National Parks or National Landscapes) the application may take longer and cost more, and certain professional surveys may be required at additional cost (e.g. Preliminary Environmental Assessments (PEAs), tree surveys, drainage surveys or Habitat Regulations Assessments).

Observatory Planning Permission documentation

As I live in a conservation area, planning permission was required and Neil even took that on, managing the whole process through to Local Authority approval. Working closely with me through every stage of design and detailed planning, through to final construction, the end-to-end service was second to none.

MARK HALEY