In article ,
"Christian McArdle" writes:

Apparently, their plan calls for two off street parking spaces for every
house of this size. The defined a parking space as being 2.4m x 4.8m. The
drive was only 9m long, hence 60cm too short. We would probably have got
permission, but moved house before the conversion.

It's the same sort of thing in my area. I watched the planning process
for two new houses just up my road. These were 4 bedroom houses (must
be small bedrooms). They each required 2 off-street parking places, one
of which must be suitable for a disabled driver to load/unload their own
wheelchair and access the house (in effect, an extra-wide parking space).
This was satisfied in this case with a single garage built in to the house,
set back far enough for another parking space to be the driveway.
In practice, they use the garage as storage, and the extra wide parking
space for two cars.

However, the planning people aren't consistent. In the meeting, one of
the councillors asked the others "we don't require a driveway capable of
turning round a car off-road do we?", to which the others answered "no".
I have the planning permission for my house, 2 doors down the road,
which states that the drive must be large enough to enable a car to be
turned around off-road. So you get different rules made up for different
planning applications on the spur of the moment.

Actually, it was interesting to see how many mistakes were made in
building these two houses. When the walls were up to about 3' high,
they realised the garage was narrower than permitted (the minimum
size was to allow a car and two bicycles to be fitted in). This went
back to a planning meeting, and they were allowed to continue providing
garden sheds were built suitable for holding 2 bicycles, so these
two houses have a planning requirement to have garden sheds of a certain
minimum size. The house plans included chimneys from fireplaces in the
living room. They were not building these and went back to have them
removed from the plans, which was refused, so the chimney's had to be
built.

Planning permission also required a number of the trees and hedges
around the plot to be retained. These had already been ripped up by the
time planning permission was granted (probably at the instant anyone got
some hint their retention was going to be required), but no one seemed
to do anything about that.

--
Andrew Gabriel