Farms are told to diversify – but they can't get the planning through

Telegraph

23-04-2025

Peter Hogg's family have farmed at Causey Park, near Morpeth, under huge Northumberland skies, since 1854. With his daughter now involved, he has no plans for the centuries-old family business, which he runs with his brother Stephen, to shut up shop. But it has become far more challenging. Some farms have faced the loss of entire crops over the past two years due to record rainfall. Changes to inheritance tax and farm subsidies have put more pressure on Hogg than ever before, just at the point where he is readying himself to hand the business over to the next generation. Like farmers up and down the country, Hogg, 73, has a choice. It is not enough to simply work the land: you have to diversify – find new income streams – or bust.
An obvious solution to the mounting financial pressures, for Hogg, was to convert unused farm buildings into holiday accommodation. Diversifying is just 'making use of everything – I suppose it's nothing new,' he says. As well as a mixed arable, beef and sheep farm, 'when our great-grandparents bought the place, there was a sandstone quarry, a clay mine. There was a brickworks. There's been all sorts going on.' He soon found out it was not that simple. 'The difficulties with planning laws mean that businesses are held back and don't grow,' he says.
Behind every farm gate, there's a glut of red tape. The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has warned that farmers, and rural communities more broadly, are facing lengthy waits to secure planning permission, sometimes of five years or more. To illustrate this, the CLA sent Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to 38 councils in rural areas. Of the 35 that replied, 14 had stalled planning applications from before 2020 still waiting for approval. Dorset council, for instance, took an average of 1,372 days, or three years and nine months, to issue a decision. In one case in south Norfolk, a 2007 application for a recreational fishing lake took seven years to process before apparently stalling in 2014. Victoria Vyvyan, the CLA's president, said 'our planning system is in crisis and it's stagnating growth in the countryside.'
In Hogg's case, an application to turn a disused farm building into a B&B took 18 months because of a quibble over adding a sunroom. 'It was exactly where there was a building that my father knocked off about 40 years ago. So we just thought, 'oh, we'll stick it back on,'' he continues. 'The planners came along and said, 'you need planning permission for that.' It took 18 months and £8,000 in planning fees, architectural drawings, building inspection fees and god knows what to get it through, and then once it was done, it cost £800 and a fortnight to put the thing up.'
The majority of farmers have no choice but to turn to other sources of income, and are being actively encouraged to diversify their businesses: most commonly by letting out buildings for non-agricultural use, selling produce or, like Hogg, providing holiday accommodation.
In most cases, it is no longer enough to work the land: government figures show that in 2023-24, even before sweeping reforms to inheritance tax were enacted, 30 per cent of farms in the UK failed to make a profit. 'You're trying to do your best to run a business, and then in every way they're putting blocks in front of you,' Hogg says. 'There's a load of bureaucracy in the way. We're trying to work our way towards being sustainable [as a business].' But the local authority's planning system makes this far harder than it needs to be.
Henry Doble is the associate director of rural planning consultancy Acorus and advises farmers on a daily basis. 'On the one hand, you've got government ministers coming out and saying, 'well, tough, the inheritance tax [rise] has come in and you'd better go out and diversify',' he says. 'But it's not actually as simple as that, because of a whole raft of issues in the planning system. The main thing we're experiencing at the moment is just the cost and time involved.'
Local authority planners are one thing, but farmers face another foe when it comes to securing planning permission: the great-crested newt. This species of newt, like bats, badgers, water voles and otters, is protected by legislation including the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. They are an old adversary: Boris Johnson once claimed ' newt-counting delays ' were holding the country back. Rachel Reeves said that developers would no longer need to worry about ' the bats and the newts ' in an attempt to kick-start Labour's ambitious house-building plans. Despite this, for farmers, they are still a going concern.
Hogg says a local friend was widowed and decided to renovate an old farm building she owned that had previously been used for storage. 'She thought she would convert it back into a house and go and live in it,' he says. 'She had to apply for planning permissions, as you do, and they said you'll need to do a bat survey, an owl survey, a hedgehog survey, a crested newt survey, a toxicology report on the soil, in case there have been toxins stored in the shed, an environmental impact study… it took forever, because they said they can only do some in nesting season,' he continues. Some ecology surveys can only be done in certain seasons, which can add significant delays before an application has even been submitted.
'Eventually she got planning permission, but they said some of the wildlife surveys were now out of date, and she'd have to do them again, Hogg says. 'It cost her over £30,000 before she'd even bought a brick.' For small business owners and farmers who are short on cash, the lengthy surveys and the cost of building delays can be debilitating.
These stories will likely resonate with farmers nationwide. Jeremy Clarkson was so frustrated by the red tape he encountered when he applied to build a restaurant and car park on his Diddly Squat farm near Chadlington, Oxfordshire, that he lobbied the government into changing planning laws last year. ' Clarkson's clause,' as it has been called, came into effect last May. Officially an extension of Class R and Q permitted development rights, the changes apply across all local authorities and were designed to allow farmers to diversify their businesses more easily by turning certain disused agricultural buildings into homes or shops without applying for planning permission.
While this has gone some way in encouraging growth in the countryside, it does not seem to have cleared the backlog. 'I've seen a number of applications that technically should have been determined in eight weeks rumble on for 12 months or more,' says Mark Turner, a partner at Aaron & Partners solicitors who specialises in planning and the environment. 'I have, on occasion, seen applications drag on for five years.'
This is an issue that the National Farmers Union (NFU) is all too aware of. In its newly published blueprint for growth, it calls on the Government to address planning delays by adequately funding the planning system and making a biodiversity net gain (BNG – a mandatory requirement in England for developers to leave the natural environment in a better state than before) exemption for development relating to agriculture.
The changes permitted development rights have 'certainly provided a bit of encouragement and impetus in the industry for more diversification,' he adds, 'but the issue is still resources in local authorities – or a lack of resources. It can be difficult to get anything from them when it's needed.' Hogg says, all things considered, the situation is 'dismal'. 'Our farm will survive,' he says, 'but in an increasingly uncertain future.'