Paving near you

The rule is written as a condition rather than a ban, which is what most homeowners miss. The Planning Portal's position is that a new or replacement driveway of any size needs no permission where it uses permeable or porous surfacing which allows water to drain through, giving gravel, permeable concrete block paving and porous asphalt as examples, or where the rainwater is directed to a lawn or border to drain naturally. Only when neither of those applies does the five square metre threshold matter, and above it a traditional impermeable surface that does not provide for the water to run to a permeable area requires an application.

Two details decide whether the rule reaches your project at all. It covers the front garden specifically, and the permitted development allowances apply to houses and not to flats and maisonettes, converted houses or houses created through permitted development rights for changes of use or new dwellinghouses. The Planning Portal also flags areas where a planning condition, an Article 4 Direction or another restriction limits permitted development rights, which is a local question your planning authority answers rather than one you can settle from a national page.

The threshold has a date behind it. GOV.UK's guidance on permeable surfacing records that from 1 October 2008 the government would introduce changes to the General Permitted Development Order making the hard surfacing of more than five square metres of domestic front gardens permitted development only where the surface in question is rendered permeable. That page is written as period guidance in the future tense, so treat it as the origin of the rule and the Planning Portal as the statement of what applies now. The same guidance describes the approaches available: permeable surfaces, soakaways and rain gardens.

Once you are past the front garden the picture changes completely. The Planning Portal states that elsewhere around your house there are no restrictions on the area of land which you can cover with hard surfaces at, or near, ground level. A large rear terrace, a side path and a parking area behind a gate are therefore not constrained by any square metre figure, which surprises people who have read about the front garden rule and assumed it covers the whole property.

There is a significant qualification attached to it. The same page warns that significant works of embanking or terracing to support a hard surface might need a planning application. That is the provision that catches sloping gardens, where getting a level surface means building the ground up, and it is worth raising with the planning authority at the design stage rather than after the retaining structure has been priced. The page also states that if you live in a listed building you will need listed building consent for any significant works, whether internal or external.

Scotland runs its own order and reaches a stricter answer. The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (Scotland) Order 1992 contains a class permitting the provision within the curtilage of a dwellinghouse of a hard surface for any purpose incidental to the enjoyment of the dwellinghouse, and attaches a flat exclusion: development is not permitted by that class within a conservation area or within the curtilage of a listed building. A Scottish homeowner in a conservation area is therefore making an application for a surface a neighbour outside it could lay freely. Northern Ireland operates a separate planning system and its own permitted development order, so the England detail should not be assumed to carry across; ask the local council before the old surface comes up.

The surface is the part you see and the least important part of the job. Expect the contractor to excavate to a depth that suits the loading, lay and compact a sub base in layers, set the falls so water moves in a chosen direction, install edge restraints so the surface cannot spread sideways, and only then lay the wearing course. A permeable build up is different in kind rather than in degree: it uses clean, open graded stone so that water can occupy the spaces between the pieces, which is why a permeable drive cannot simply be a normal drive with gaps in the top.

Ask where the water is going and get the answer written into the quotation. GOV.UK's national standards for sustainable drainage systems describe SuDS as managing surface water in a way that mimics natural processes, and list the opportunities they offer, including water reuse, reducing flood risk by slowing and storing runoff, and improving water quality by filtering pollutants. On a domestic job that translates into a specific question: does the water soak away within your own ground, go to a border or lawn, or run onto the pavement and into the highway drain.

Cutting is where the health risk sits, and paving involves a lot of it. HSE states that regularly breathing construction dust can cause diseases like lung cancer, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and silicosis, that these diseases cause permanent disability and early death, and that over 500 construction workers are believed to die from exposure to silica dust every year. Its construction dust information sheet names cutting concrete kerbs, blocks and paving with a cut-off saw as one of the high risk tasks, and lists the ways of designing the dust out: limiting the number of cuts, using block splitters, and getting material cut off site and delivered. Where cutting must happen, the controls are water suppression, on-tool extraction and respiratory protective equipment, under the assess, control and review approach of COSHH. A crew dry cutting blocks in your front garden with no water and no extraction is showing you how the rest of the job will be done.

Standing water is the beginning of nearly every paving failure in this country. A surface laid flat, or laid to fall towards a gully that has since blocked, holds water that softens the material beneath it through months of winter rain. Once the sub base is soft the surface starts to move under wheel loads, and the ruts and dips that follow collect more water still. By the time the damage is obvious the cause is usually several winters old.

Permeable surfaces fail in their own particular way, and it is a quiet one. They silt up. Fine material, moss, leaf litter and grit work into the open joints or the voids until the surface stops accepting water and begins to pond like any impermeable one. That matters twice over in a front garden, because the permeability was the condition the surfacing relied on, so a clogged permeable drive is both a drainage problem and a planning one. Sealing it over to tidy the appearance defeats the whole basis on which it was laid.

The third cause is the edge. A paved area with no effective restraint has nothing to push against, so the outermost units creep outwards under traffic, the joints open, and the failure travels inwards from the perimeter. Add to that everything already buried in a British front garden, where old service trenches, the line of a grubbed out wall and made ground all settle at their own pace, and you have the explanation for most damage that follows a straight line across an otherwise sound surface.

Because paving is not a licensed trade in the United Kingdom, there is no register to look a contractor up on and the protection comes from the written specification. Get it to state the excavation depth, the sub base material and its compacted thickness, whether the build up is permeable or impermeable, the surfacing product, the edge restraint detail, the direction of the falls and the precise point where the water discharges. Where the work is in a front garden, ask the contractor to say in writing which limb of the Planning Portal rule the design satisfies: permeable surfacing, run off directed to a permeable area, or an application.

Ask who is taking the spoil away, because a paving job generates a great deal of it. GOV.UK states that a business must register if it transports waste as a carrier, and that registration is usually free if it only transports waste it produces itself, with registered organisations appearing in the public register of waste carriers, brokers and dealers. The excavated soil, the broken concrete and the old surface all have to go somewhere lawful, and the answer belongs in the quotation rather than in a conversation on the day.

LokalMatch is where the comparison starts. You describe the paving job once, including the area, whether it is in the front garden or behind the house, what is there now and where you think the water goes, and matched paving contractors covering your postcode get in touch with you directly. The contractors pay for the requests they receive, so posting one costs a homeowner nothing. LokalMatch does not lay paving and does not set prices, and it does not vet, rank or recommend anyone, so comparing the build up, the drainage and the dust controls between quotations remains yours to do.