FOI request (FOIR-558809058)

I am getting in contact on behalf of the IHIPHE study team, led by Professor Ben Clifford at University College London, regarding our study to investigate the effects of Permitted Development (PD) on health.  

The reason for my email is that the first stage of the work is to compile a list of PD homes and a starting point for this is inspecting prior approval submissions to all local planning authorities across England. We would be grateful if you could provide us with a list from your planning database (in the form of an Excel sheet or csv file) of any prior approvals submitted for office to residential (dwellinghouses), storage or distribution centre to residential, light industrial to residential, retail to residential, financial and professional services to residential, betting shops to residential, pay day loan shops to residential, laundrettes to residential, casinos and amusement arcades to residential and agricultural to residential (Class M, Class MA, Class N, Class O, Class P, Class PA and Class Q under the GPDO) submitted from 1 May 2013 to 30 April 2023. We would need the list to show the reference number from your database, the full site address, the dates of application, the description of the application, and the decision outcome. If the number of proposed dwellinghouse units and Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) were readily available as part of any such list this would also be helpful.

If possible, it would also be helpful to have an export from your planning database of any cases where there was a full planning permission for change of use for the same dates. We would only be interested in changes from another use to residential, but I don’t know how easy that is to pick out for you, but perhaps we can if you are able to send the wider list of change of use applications. This would help where some schemes may have done a prior approval as a fall back, then a planning permission which was implemented instead and so are not really PD-created schemes at all – in which case if we address match between the two lists, we can hopefully spot those too. 

Once we have collated prior approval data for all local planning authorities, we will combine them with data from a commercial construction database, EPC data and Ordnance Survey data to create a national list of all completed PD housing. This list will then inform a series of activities to assess the health risks of PD housing, which include using data linkage methods to compare NHS health records of residents of PD housing to residents of other properties, surveys and interviews to explore residents’ lived experiences, and work to understand overheating and poor ventilation issues. With these data, we will calculate the health economic costs of issues we have identified and compare these to the costs of potential interventions to address them. We will then finally explore the ways in which policy ‘levers’ are and could be used to improve housing quality to deliver better health outcomes for people. More detailed information about the project is available on the NIHR website via this link, in case it is useful context for you.