Planning system simplified for homeowners

Posted: 16 Sep 2008 10:30:09 GMT

People planning improvements to their home in order to boost its value will benefit from new government regulations, it has been claimed.

According to the British Property Federation (BPF), new rules introduced to parliament will remove some 80,000 planning applications from the system by allowing homeowners to build small loft conversions and extensions without requiring planning permission first.

Changes to the general permitted development order were laid out by housing and planning minister Caroline Flint, and will come into effect next month.

As well as saving an estimated £50 million each year in application fees and costs, the new regulations could also shake-up the housing market by allowing home sellers to make their properties more valuable.

Welcoming the changes, Jonathan Seager, senior policy officer at the BPF, said: "We see this announcement as hopefully the start of some common sense changes the government can easily make to improve the planning system."

Last week, the government also announced new measures to help modest-income households to cut their energy costs over the next three years - part of its plan to make the country's housing energy efficient by 2020.


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