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If and when they come to sell the house, wouldn’t they have to remove the garage if it doesn’t have planning permission?
Two major caveats to this advice - I know only a little on planning law, and I know fuck all about Scots law generally.
However, in the Sunlit Uplands of Engerlandshire, if the garage has been in place for 20 years you could regularise the position by applying for a Certificate of Lawful Use. Essentially, once a structure has been in place for a sufficient period of time without the local planning authority doing anything about it, you're home and dry (subject to exceptions).
If you wanted to rebuild then I think you'd still need planning consent for any demolition and rebuilding (unless you rely on the 'nah, mate, just very extensive repairs' loophole) but if you had a CLU the chances are you'd get permission if you were merely replacing like for like.
But, as I said, IANAPlanningL.
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Brommers
I’m seriously considering rebuilding my garage from scratch.
It’s detached and about 6 by 6 meters roughly.
Our neighbours garage is right beside ours, theirs is attached to the side of their house.
The distance between our garage walls is about half a meter. I think that current regulations would say the distance should be at least 1 meter?
The small gap between the garages is completely full of rubble, it looks like builders have discarded bricks and other rubbish in there at some point in the past. It’s even been bricked up at one end to keep all the rubble in. I can’t understand why anyone would have done this but it’s there.
The rendering on my wall has come off completely. There is water ingress coming through the wall due to the rubble directing all rain water straight onto the wall.
I’ve recently been told by another neighbour that the garage wasn’t always there and was built at least 20 years ago. Apparently it was built without planning permission and it isn’t on the plans for the house.
Before the garage was built there was a path in its place that gave access to the rear gardens of the small row of terraced houses. This was to allow each property to move their bins out to the front to collect.
All the rubble between them is literally stuck there, there just no way to remove it.
If I rebuild my garage I think I’d have to build it 1 meter away from the neighbours garage to stay within regulations but this would obviously make my garage smaller which I don’t want.
So in order to rebuild my garage to the same size, the neighbours garage would have to come down…
My neighbours are nice enough, a couple in their sixties, recently retired. I get on well with them.
I’ve mentioned the rubble before and they claim they have no idea how or why it got there.
Where do I stand with this?
If and when they come to sell the house, wouldn’t they have to remove the garage if it doesn’t have planning permission?
If they tried to apply retroactively I’d sure as fuck object to it.
I’m obviously going to have to bring it up to them at some point but without sounding too matter of fact.
But at the same time I can’t help feel they are in the wrong and it was pretty arrogant to build without planning permission.
I’m in Scotland if that matters
Edit-I’ll get some photos of what this rubble filled gap looks like