Farm diversification: an illustrative glamping site application

Most glamping proposals on working farms fail on one of three things: foul drainage, access, or the gap between what the temporary use right allows and what the business actually needs. This glamping site planning application example is illustrative, assembled from the pattern these schemes follow rather than from any single real case, and it follows one holding from first idea to the end of its first trading season.

The farm in the example runs 140 hectares of mixed arable and grazing, with a redundant concrete yard, a sloping field behind a mature hedgerow, and a single track lane to the public highway. No National Landscape designation, no listed buildings, and no mains drainage within reach.

The holding and the business case

The proposal was six safari tents on timber decks in the sloping field, with a shower block converted from a redundant implement shed, parking on the existing concrete yard, and a seven month season from April to October.

The business case mattered to the planning case more than the owner expected. National policy supports sustainable rural tourism and farm diversification where the development is appropriately located and designed, and local plans generally echo that with a test about scale, landscape impact and the link to the existing enterprise. Showing that the units supported the farm rather than replacing it, with the yard and shed reused instead of new build in open countryside, did real work in the officer's report.

The weaker version of this case is the one that reads as a holiday park on a farm. Six units attached to a working holding is diversification. Thirty units with a reception building and a bar is a tourism development that happens to be in a field, and it is assessed as one.

Where the 28 day temporary right runs out

Part 4 Class B of the General Permitted Development Order allows the temporary use of land for most purposes for up to 28 days in any calendar year, together with moveable structures for that use. It is the right every glamping article mentions and the right almost no viable business can live inside.

Twenty-eight days across a calendar year is four weekends and a bit. The owner had initially planned to test the market under the right before applying, which is reasonable, but two limitations surfaced quickly. The days are cumulative across the year, not per structure, and the right does not cover the engineering operations that make a site work: the hardstanding, the decking bases, the drainage runs and the services.

The right has been amended more than once, including temporary increases, so check the current wording of the Order rather than relying on a remembered figure. On this holding the conclusion was that a full planning application was needed, and testing the market first under the temporary right simply delayed it by a season.

One further consent sits alongside planning. Where units are caravans in the statutory sense, meaning structures capable of being moved in one piece, a site licence under the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960 is usually required from the council as well, with exemptions in Schedule 1 to that Act. Safari tents and yurts on fixed decks generally fall outside that definition, and pods on skids often fall inside it. Ask the council's licensing team early, because the licence conditions can affect spacing and layout after the planning permission is issued.

Siting, landscape and the visual appraisal

The sloping field was the wrong field, and the landscape work showed it. Units on a slope read against the skyline from the lane and from a public footpath on the opposite valley side. Moving them to the lower part of the field, behind the mature hedgerow and against the woodland edge, removed almost all of the visual effect.

The appraisal that supported the application was proportionate: a set of photographs from agreed viewpoints on the lane, the footpath and the nearest village edge, a short analysis of landscape character using the published character assessment, and a planting schedule. A full Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment would have been required for a larger scheme or inside a designation, and for six units a shorter appraisal to the same structure was accepted.

Lighting was the detail that nearly undid the landscape case. The first iteration proposed column lighting along the access track. The revision used low level bollards on timers, downward directed, with no lighting to the units themselves beyond porch fittings, and a Lighting Assessment setting the obtrusive light limits for a dark rural zone. Officers in rural authorities take this seriously, and a dark skies condition is now common on these permissions.

Foul drainage with no mains connection

Off-mains drainage is where glamping applications most often stall, because the solution has to be designed rather than asserted.

The shower block and the units generated a modest daily flow, and the chosen solution was a package treatment plant discharging to a drainage field in the adjoining pasture. Three pieces of evidence made it work.

1. Percolation testing in the proposed drainage field location, at the depth the field would be laid, with the results reported rather than summarised.
2. A drainage field sized on those results, set out on a plan with the separation distances from the watercourse, the boreholes and the boundary shown.
3. Confirmation that the discharge fell within the general binding rules for small sewage discharges to ground, with the registration position stated, rather than leaving the regulatory route to be worked out later.

A Foul Sewage Assessment that names the receiving environment, the treatment standard and the regulatory route reads as competent to both the case officer and the environmental health officer. The version that says "package treatment plant to be installed" invites a condition requiring full details, which then becomes a pre-commencement condition and delays the first season.

Water supply came from the existing farm borehole, which raised its own question about whether supplying paying guests changed the regulatory position on private water supplies. That was dealt with through the council's environmental health team and outside the planning application.

Access, parking and passing bays

The single track lane was the highway authority's only interest. The response asked for visibility at the junction with the C road, a passing bay part way along the lane, and confirmation of parking numbers on the existing yard.

Nothing here needed a transport consultant. Trip generation for six units over a seven month season is low, arrivals and departures cluster on changeover days, and the application set out expected vehicle movements by day of the week along with a booking policy staggering arrival times. The passing bay was offered before it was asked for, which costs very little and removes the highway authority's standard reason for objection.

The yard surface was already there, which helped twice over. No new hardstanding meant no additional surface water, and the parking sat away from the units, keeping cars out of the views the landscape work had just protected. A related walkthrough on a solar array on agricultural land and the classification question shows the same principle of reusing degraded ground rather than better land.

Conditions on occupancy and season

The permission came with conditions that are standard on this kind of scheme, and each one deserves reading before it is accepted.

Occupation was limited to holiday use, with no unit to be occupied as a sole or main residence, and a register of occupiers to be kept and made available to the council on request. The number of units was capped at six and tied to the approved layout plan. The season was limited, with units to be left unoccupied outside the stated months. Lighting was controlled by condition. External materials and the planting schedule were conditioned, with the planting to be carried out in the first planting season following first occupation.

The seasonal condition is the one owners most often want varied later, and varying it means a section 73 application with the same consultation as the original. If a longer season is part of the business plan, apply for it at the outset with the evidence to support it.

The first season's compliance record

The owner kept three things from the start: the occupancy register, dated photographs of the planting as carried out, and the commissioning and servicing records for the treatment plant. All three were asked for, two by the council and one by the insurer.

Keeping records as you go costs less than reconstructing them later. A monitoring visit in the second season found the units in the approved positions, the planting established and the register complete, and that was the end of it.

You can see which reports a rural diversification scheme is likely to need and draft them from your own site details before commissioning the drainage and landscape work.

This is general guidance, not legal advice, and permitted development rights and licensing requirements change. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.