Hi all. Is anyone aware of any instance in which external wall insulation has been permitted on the front of a house (preferably terrace, ideally end of terrace) in a conservation area? My local planners are requesting “precedent images”, though I suspect they already know the answer…
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I very obtusely face a conservation area and the planners think that changing the appearance of my 1930s house will adversely impact the 1700s conservation area. Given that attitude I don’t know why they have a tarmac road or haven’t demolished my house and replanted an orchard.
Anyway, I took many photos of local houses, mostly in the same style, that had either been rendered or insulated, with render. It was to no avail. It would be a very expensive option but I am wondering whether I could render the house (using neighbours as a precedent and then add EWI, demonstrating that there is no change of appearance.
My current stance is to get on with other tasks and add EWI when regulations change.
When we applied photos of jobs like ours the planners said they didn’t accept ‘precedence’ as part of justification.
I was asked for precedence post application. Clearly there isn’t much consistency.
Great question. I look forward to the responses.
I’d also like to know if some hybrid compromise is possible. Such as having EWI on the gable end and rear of the building, with some form of transition detail to the original facade (IWI), such as faux quoins in masonry buildings.
Revisiting this topic:
It was suggested to me by the planning officer that I only insulate the end and rear of my house, leaving the front “as is”. The front faces north (ish), so that wasn’t a very practical solution. There are properties with a combination of EWI and IWI but the “joins” or lack of them are a source of thermal bridging. Generally a 1 metre overlap is required to minimise this. That can cause aesthetic problems in the house and properly terminating the EWI outside can also give problems, not least with weatherproofing the end. Not insurmountable, I’m sure, but a right pain somewhere or other (including the wallet).
While waiting for the planning climate to improve (probably requiring the meteorological climate to deteriorate) I am moving on to other tasks.
I have decided that my own knowledge and experience are not adequate to see me through to EnerPHit equivalent so have now contacted a Passivhaus designer. It will be interesting to see how that changes things. Full PHPP survey in early September. I may well start a new topic to report on progress.
Revisiting this topic, this time with good news: the house that Maddy Lundholm was talking about is mine and my wife’s. It’s in a conservation area and is already rendered at the front. We want to do a retrofit that includes a complete external insulation wrap, walls and roof. After a costly 15 month fight with the planners, last week our resubmitted planning application at last went in front of the county planning committee. The planners fought tooth and nail to stop us. But the councillors rejected the planners’ recommendation of refusal, by a 10 to 1 vote.
We only managed to get in front of the county planning committee because our local town council had previously expressed their support for us. Hurray for local democracy all round.
What became apparent early on in this painful affair, is that there’s actually no problem with the planning rules. The rules prescribe a rational process for weighing the conflicting demands of heritage conservation and other desirable priorities, like minimising illness or the consequences of climate heating.
The problem is that most planners lack the skills to do that. It’s too complicated. They think (wrongly) that conservation areas are intended to be frozen in their current state and that therefore any change (aka “development”) is harmful by definition. They act as advocates for the conservation areas, but they have no-one in their team to act as the advocate for, say, energy efficiency measures or the objectives of the Climate Change Act. When the planners present their conclusions, they do so not as impartial expert witnesses, but as prosecutors for the case against the defending planning applicant, who is gagged.
I need to write a guide to all this. We were definitely helped by a very recent planning appeal decision, in which the government’s inspector overturned a planning authority’s refusal to allow PV panels on an outbuilding of a listed building. To quote the inspector: “the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions arising from increased renewable energy generation is undoubtedly an important public benefit… The extent of ‘less than substantial harm’ to the listed building and conservation area would be small. Even attributing these harms great weight, they are outweighed by the significant weight of the public benefits.”
That’s the kind of sentence that our planners can’t write. Needless to say, our agent explained the relevance of this appeal decision to the planners. They stuck their fingers in their ears. But it definitely helped, when I read it out to the councillors on the committee.
You can find the Wiltshire appeal decision at this link. Click on the Documents tab and look for ‘Appeal – Decision’.
https://development.wiltshire.gov.uk/pr/s/planning-application/a0i3z00001AxZZsAAN
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