Experience
One scheme in full, and a lot of quieter work around it.
The largest thing we have been part of is a 1,550-home urban extension. Most of what we do is smaller, and a good deal of it never becomes an application at all.
The principal case
New Eastern Villages, Swindon
New Eastern Villages is the strategic allocation on the eastern edge of Swindon: more than 8,000 homes and around 40 hectares of employment land. Great Stall East is its first phase, with outline consent for up to 1,550 homes on a site the local plan had allocated for about 1,100.
It took three years and nine months to move from a submitted application to a permission anyone could build against, and almost none of that time was spent on the scheme itself.
Existing site, and the consented scheme
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The rest of the work
A scheme the size of New Eastern Villages is not representative. Most instructions are a single site, a single policy question, or a council that needs to understand a document before it can respond to it. These are the shapes that recur.
Allocation and local plan work
Promoting land through a plan, and on the other side of the table, helping parish and town councils read what a draft allocation would actually mean for them and respond to it in terms an inspector will weigh.
Site appraisal before commitment
Whether a site is worth pursuing at all, and what it would take. This is the work most likely to end in advice not to proceed, which is the point of paying for it.
Applications and reserved matters
Householder to major, and the reserved matters that follow an outline. The unglamorous half of a consent, and the half where programmes slip.
Appeals and refusals
Reading a refusal properly before deciding whether to appeal, rewrite or walk away. An appeal is one of three options and often not the best one.
Policy and evidence research
Standalone analysis for teams who need a defensible read on housing land supply, a policy change or a local plan position, and need to put their own name to it.
Acting for objectors
Communities and neighbours facing an application. What is worth objecting to, what carries weight, and what will simply be noted and set aside.
Why there is one case study and not twelve
Most planning advice is given in confidence, and a good deal of it is advice not to proceed. Neither makes a case study. We would rather show one scheme in enough detail that you can check it than a grid of logos that tells you nothing about how anybody thinks.
If you want to know whether we have handled something like your situation, ask. We will tell you plainly, including when the answer is no.