British Farmer Ordered To Tear Down Home He Built | Hacker News Reader

British Farmer Ordered To Tear Down Home He Built

npr.org

13 pointsmhb20 comments

Ok. I've lived in England all my life. Let's highlight a few facts:

* Planning laws in the UK exist largely to protect the countryside from being over-developed by often powerful building firms.

* Surrey (the county where this man built is castle), being directly south of London, is one of the most difficult and expensive areas to buy (or build) property.

* The English countryside is under threat, especially in the south-east of the country where urban growth is a constant threat to communities.

* Planning laws are well known and understood here. This man tried to circumvent them at every opportunity, for his own benefit, and got caught out. Big time.

You can argue that this is only one little castle, or that it shouldn't apply to individuals, or whatever, but the fact is that the laws exist and (generally) do a good job at making sure that the beautiful countryside doesn't turn into an over-developed shit-hole.

I understand the reasons these laws exist. There's no reason at all to call them out for being either over-bureaucratic, or an example of the over-arching state. They exist for a reason, basically the good of the wider community, and this guy tried to circumvent them for his own selfish (presumably financial) benefit.

I've absolutely no sympathy for him at all.

I grew up in a quaint British farming village, and I'm pretty conflicted about this story.

- My family are all nurses, and my brother and sister can't dream of buying a house in our home-town, it's too expensive.

- The planning restrictions are pretty draconian. This keeps the supply of housing very limited, but also prevents the fields between us and the next village from being covered in houses and turning us into a suburb of Cambridge.

- The local farmers own land that's benefited from the rise in prices, and so tend to be pretty rich, hence the castle-building.

So I do end up admiring this guy's chutzpah, but I can't summon up too much sympathy when everyone else is stuck following the rules. I'd be much more interested in a campaign to change the planning regulations and skip the current uber-NIMBYism.

That's a shame. It's a beautiful house.

Another instance of beaurocracy failing the common man. I highly doubt he is hurting anyone or anything. Especially considering it's placed in the middle of a field and no one noticed for two years.

This sort of thing is inherent to the idea that you have to get government permission to build a structure for your own use on your own property.

Except it's not really "your own" property, unless you hold allodial title. Which, in England (and the US, and pretty much anywhere) individuals don't and legally can't.

Flip this around: if nobody knew it was there, then nobody checked that it was built to code. And, well, building codes are generally held to be as useful today as they were back when Hammurabi wrote down the first one (of course, in his day enforcement was a bit more strict...).

Codes exist to benefit the homeowner. Nobody should have the right to force you to tear down your newly built home because they think it's not up to an arbitrary standard.

There's also nothing in the article to suggest that it's not up to code. I'm sure the electricians did their usual standard of work...

Nobody should have the right to force you to tear down your newly built home because they think it's not up to an arbitrary standard.

If you built that home illegally, then someone most certainly should have the right to take action. Also, building codes aren't exactly "arbitrary", ya know?

I'm sure the electricians did their usual standard of work

But you don't know. You can't know. Nobody knows and nobody can know, because -- by hiding the construction -- this guy almost certainly also hid it from the routine checks which would have provided that sort of information. Most work done by most contractors most of the time is probably fine, but inspections and other checks are there for the cases where the work isn't fine, because we've decided, as a society, that it's worth that overhead to avoid the nasty consequences.

I wonder to what building codes are shanty towns built or trailer parks. I wonder why government won't go bother them.

There's a tent city/shantytown here in my home town which is in a perpetual cycle of being torn down and rebuilt. Every so often someone dies or is seriously injured, and the police clear everybody out and tear it down. Then people come back and start rebuilding it for a while. Then someone dies or is seriously injured, the police clear everybody out...

That kinda illustrates what I mean.

You can effectively perform legal action against single guy who was smart and rich enough built huge castle for his family (and probably did it smart way), but you can't do anything effective to protect people inhabiting most dangerous buildings because you don't have tools to enforce building code on them. Periodical tearing it down doesn't do anything good.

You're one step down the "should" chain.

You're saying it's illegal, so he should face the consequences.

I'm saying it shouldn't be illegal to build one's house however one wishes.

As one example: most building codes dictate the building materials you can use. Want to build a Compressed Earth Block or rammed earth home? Better hope it's in your state's building code, or that there is precedent for you to use to sway the inspector.

I think that's wrong. Sure, impose building codes on buildings built for others (e.g., hotels, multi-family dwellings). Don't impose them on personal dwellings. If you want to be able to sell, you have an incentive to build it to code, but you shouldn't be obliged to do so.

(Rammed earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rammed_earth)

I'm aware of some jurisdictions where building codes are only enforced when a building is sold. If you build it yourself and never sell it, there's effectively no building code.

I think that's a happy medium between this sort of absurdity and a complete lack of regulation.

If I were him, I would pull an Arthur Dent and lock myself to the house on demolition day.

(The hyperspace bypass is another issue altogether, however.)

Heard this on NPR today while driving, they seemed to focus more on the fact that it was a castle and he hid it for four years by building a giant haystack wall around it, and not so much on the fact that the gov't is ordering him to tear it down.

That because that's the legal point. He was denied planning permission, but built it anyway - relying on a rule that says if nobody reports it for 4years it's grandfathered in.

But the court ruled that the four years only started from when he removed the concealing straw bales and people could see it.

Otherwise I could bury some foundations, wait four years and claiming that nobody had complained I could 'complete' my 40 story apartment complex.

Not quite---the rule says (according to the BBC article on this) that the four years starts from completion of the building, which would prevent your scenario. The current judge appears to be arguing that the bales of hay, which were not structural and to my understanding didn't even touch the house, were integral and that the house was not 'complete' until they were removed. It's a bit of a stretch, and it sure sounds like the judge is just annoyed that this guy found a loophole.

My understanding was that the point being argued was over whether the removal of the hay bales constituted continuation of the building project - which resets the 4 year time window - or if it was unrelated.

Given that the only reason the hay bales were there was to conceal the construction of the property, I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that removing them constitutes part of the project.

The court's standard of what "deception" is seems a very slippery slope indeed. What next - mis-spell a word on a form, and have the entire application voided years later and a permit revoked?

I remember this story from a couple years ago.

Sad that the courts appear to not be going his way. That said, I'd love to see what the planning commissions specific complaints are, to see if we're dealing with some sort of legitimate concern, or if it's just general abuse of power.

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