shoemaker666
Distinguished Member
in the future they are on about making you have to get planning permission to block pave your driveway. does anybody know when this comes in to effect or whether they have even made a decision about it yet?
I thought they were suppose to make it more easier to make house improvements ?
You are gonna need planning permission to redo your drive in Oct 08 ?
you will still be able do as much block paving or concreting as you want. you just have to have to create drainage channeling in the driveway to a soak away, not to the sewage system. building control are just getting involved to make sure you drain to your property rather than connect to the sewage system.
then relies on the drains system to be able to cope with it.
If councils actually spent money (rather than increasing councillors expenses) on cleaning their drains and gullies out on a regular basis then we won't get as much flooding
Well, I guess they could spend multiple billions of pounds improving the sewage systems to the point where they could carry all the surface water which formerly would have soaked into the ground (until it was paved/concreted over).
But I suspect the general public would baulk at the cost and inconvenience of having just about every road in Britain dug up.
Making sure that paved over garden space has proper drainage in place to compensate for the lack of water soaking into the bare earth is a common sense rule.
Should have been done progressively, but like all things in the UK it starts off top of the range and then due to years of neglect become poor. Railways, Roads, Hospitals, Underground, Water pipes, gas pipes, etc
The sewer system wasn't designed to cope with the volume of surface water resulting from a craze for paving over every inch of front garden space in urban areas to use as a parking space (or just to avoid the chore of gardening). It doesn't help that often people treat the drains as some sort of public litter bin either.
Ensuring that homeowners put adequate precautions in place to deal with the flooding consequences of paving over garden space seems pretty sensible to me.
With the increasing amounts of rain we seem to be getting these days this is an issue which is going to have to be faced unless people want to experience localised flooding as a matter of routine.
Isn't it another tax ?
I see they have noe settled on a 'fee' for the application. £600, our local builder has just finished the mandatory 'course' !
From what I've read this permission is only needed if you intend to extend the driveway into the garden area, not if you intend to simply block-pave the existing driveway.