breacher wrote:Blackstuff wrote:As soon as you start moving earth to form the slightest berm you technically need planning permission.
As with anything in life there's a cost/benefit analysis that needs to be done. If you're in the middle of nowhere, with no one to annoy/get noticed by, who's to say what was or wasn't there before you started.
On the other hand if there are any roads/public views of the land/neighbours (even those who purport to get on with you), then its almost certain that your activities will end up in front of a planning enforcement officer.
So technically if you landscape your garden and move any soil beyond ground level ( rockery or other feature ) you need permission ?
What about if its not a berm ? What if you stacked a load of sandbags ?
Yes and no! The planning use class the land falls into is all important. Residential curtilage
normally enjoys certain 'Permitted Development' rights i.e. things you can build/alter etc without the need for planning permission, these are covered in Schedule 2, Part 1 of the General Permitted Development Order (GPDO) for householder type development. Some properties however do not have PD rights and require planning permission for ANYTHING that is considered to be development, i.e. all flats have no PD rights, some times they're removed from individual houses, streets or entire estates by a condition of the original planning approval for those developments. Even if your property does have PD rights depending on what you have done with the land you may still require planning permission for 'engineering works'. The right to do what you want with your own land was stripped from you by the Town and Country Planning Act 1947.
The GPDO then covers numerous other land classes/types of development, everything form CCTV cameras to windfarms and outlines what can and cannot be done, with plenty of room for interpretation between, think of it in the same way as the Firearms Act 1968 but much, much more complex!
Non-householder curtilage/agricultural land has next to no PD rights and as such virtually any development requires planning permission. Sandbags would be considered in the exact same way a berm of earth would unless you were taking them down and putting them back up every time you used the 'range', or every few months even if you didn't use it. The best backstop material to skirt the legislation are haybales, preferably the round ones which can be moved instantly by a single person if need be. However, they obviously have limited backstop capability and only really suited to containing birdshot shotgun ammo.