Planning matters

Dining and drinking out is becoming ever more popular, with hip coffee shops, boutique restaurants and micro pubs springing up on streets across Wales. Food and drink establishments can provide opportunities for a wide range of benefits, including boosting the economy, enabling social interaction, and providing opportunities for regeneration. They can also serve to support land use planning and place making objectives.

The Welsh Government is currently consulting on proposals which would include splitting the single planning use class for food and drink (A3) into three separate use classes and making changes to the permitted development rights for these uses. (For more detail, see this Lichfields’ blog.)

If these changes are implemented, those seeking planning permission for food and drink uses would do well to bolster their submissions by focusing more narrowly on the impacts which are specific to each proposal. Account should be taken of the scale and detail of the scheme, together with an understanding of its local and wider context, addressing any potential negative impacts and highlighting and quantifying (wherever possible) its particular benefits, such as those illustrated in the infographic above.