BCP Council (Bournemouth area): What the Dickens?! A Tale of Two Certificates… We don’t often talk about two completely different planning cases in the same post but sometimes it is worth comparing just to illustrate the extremes of dealing with Council planning departments, particularly BCP Council.
Last month we had two certificates of lawfulness approved by BCP Council just eight days apart. Both were for larger (“Sui Generis”) HMOs in Bournemouth and by coincidence both properties had nine occupants. Also both were pretty simple cases, they had clearly been operating for well over 10 years and we had decent evidence for both including statutory declarations from the existing owner covering the whole 10 year period and both had been licensed by the Council themselves throughout.
The only real difference is this: the first of the applications approved was submitted to the Council on the 24 April 2025, was deal with promptly with zero fuss and the certificate issued three days ahead of the statutory 8-week target. The other was submitted to the Council on 19 December 2024 (yes that is not a typo…), it took a painful 6 months of fruitless chasing, three different planning officers assigned to it and severely delayed property re-financing for our client. Why such a difference? We’re not sure the Council could explain this. But for our clients, it just comes down to good or bad luck.
Several times a week we get asked (and reasonably so) by prospective clients: “so how long will this application take?”. What are we supposed to tell them? It could be anywhere between 8 weeks and 6 months, although actually, thinking about it, in BCP it could even be worse than that…