Open storage change of use, South West

The challenge

An applicant wanted to change the use of a site in an industrial area to open storage, split into four parcels and operating twenty-four hours a day. The case officer picked up the round-the-clock working and raised it against the neighbours' amenity. The nearest homes are a good distance away, but the land between is flat and open, and a previous consent nearby had come with an hours restriction attached.

The applicant could not accept restricted access, because a future tenant might run a self-storage business where customers come and go at any hour, and a condition limiting the gates would make the site unlettable for that use.

The real difficulty was that nobody knew who the tenants would be. There were no end users for any of the four parcels, so there was no single operation to assess. Whatever went to the council had to cover the realistic range of occupiers rather than one convenient example.

What we did

We monitored for just under four days to establish how quiet it gets at night, which is the period that decides a case like this.

Then, with the applicant, we agreed three plausible occupiers to bracket the range: ordinary self-storage with vans and hand loading; heavier plant and machinery storage with lorries and a tracked excavator; and scaffolding storage, which means metal being thrown onto metal.

Each was built up as a realistic sequence of activity and then multiplied to a deliberately pessimistic level of use across all four parcels at once.

Two of the three were comfortable at every hour. The third was not. Scaffolding handling is impulsive, sharp, clattering and unpredictable, and at night, when there is little else to mask it and nobody expects industrial noise, that character carries a penalty. It was the only combination that failed.