Fees

My standard hourly rate for planning work is £200 plus Vat.

My work involves drafting, advising, negotiating, commissioning experts, attending meetings and doing all those things necessary to progress a planning application or a property dispute.

Sometimes it will be possible to agree a fixed fee at the outset. However, usually it is not possible to say how many hours a case will take. In these circumstances, I will estimate how many hours a particular item will take, agree this with you and then proceed on that item of work.

Planning fees: your LPA will publish a list of their planning fees. These change from one application to another. Usually, a one-unit application will incur a planning fee of less than £350. A 10-unit application will incur a planning fee of about £3,000.

Expert reports: the cost of these depends upon the size of the project. An Ecology report for a 500m2 plot may be only £700, but as the plot size increases so will the cost of the report. Generally, where the proposal is modest – one house – the cost of experts will also be modest.

As a proposed development gets bigger more issues arise. Each issue brings with it the need for an expert report. Hence the cost rises. So, a single house development may require only one expert report, whereas a 10 house development, because of the area of land involved will probably raise at least 4 substantive expert issues: ecology, drainage, bio-diversity, and highways. As a rule of thumb, expert reports on a half acre development will run at £3,000 per report. The more specialist the expert, the greater the cost.

Legal hours: I will give you an overall estimate of the number of hours your application will take, but this will only be an estimate. Issues change as your application progresses and objectors and the arguments they raise cannot always be anticipated.