Pottersheath Road, Welwyn

Last week DLA received an approval for a replacement dwelling in a rural area near Welwyn, which is located in the Green Belt. Before this successful permission, we advised the client to gain approvals for side extensions, rear extensions, and an additional storey using their permitted development rights. These approvals then formed our very special circumstances argument; the approved fallback position. As such, a larger and more incongruous dwelling could be built using these permissions. It is a well-established principle of planning that a decision maker must give significant weight to an applicant’s fallback position when considering the impact of a development and this is especially the case in the Green Belt. Using case law and appropriate appeal examples to back up our arguments, we successfully gained permission for the replacement dwelling.