Helping You Avoid Making Faberge Omelettes

I am a Landscape Planner and I can save you money.

Isn't that what every client wants to hear? Well, I mean it, and all it will cost you is... Actually, it will cost you, but it will be comparative peanuts, and it will save you a lot of money, time (i.e. more money) and keep your landowners and investors happy (i.e. less stress).

When you undertake your initial due diligence, before your capacity assessments, we can help you. Before you’ve pitched the investors or made an offer to the landowner, we can help you identify the risks and opportunities that will affect your developable area.

“You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs”. The idea of balancing risk and reward is not new. But that balancing act is an art and a science, where one is not rewarded for blindly taking risk. So how do you decide which is a risk worth taking, an egg to be broken? Or when that egg is actually a Fabergé egg that needs to be preserved. Armed with that advice, you can negotiate with greater confidence on the potential value of the development, share out the risk and prepare your partners for the obstacles to bringing the project to fruition.

Our clients understand this, and they get us onboard early, sometimes sending us the particulars of a site and asking for an opinion before they bid. We can give an initial steer on red flags and, very rarely, will identify a site that is so high risk we'd recommend avoiding it entirely. Isn't that what you need to know as a developer?

Here is a real scenario: a Green Belt site with a ridge running down the centre, well enclosed by strong defensible boundaries and well related to the existing built form. It looked fantastic on paper. On the site visit, it was possible to see that half of the site was visible from the nearby AONB and, more importantly, development in that half of the site would introduce development into views where there was currently none. Half of that site suddenly became high risk and was heavily recommended to be excluded from the developable area. I was on site for an hour and helped the client make a better informed decision about the value of that land.

We understand that the Masterplanner's job is to balance all of the different, and often conflicting, requirements of the consultant team, to come up with a solution that will satisfy the council and, most importantly for the client, be financially viable. As consultants, we have to be pragmatic, and to understand that if the finances don't add up, the whole exercise is academic. Our job as consultants is to identify risk and help the Masterplanner and the client reach that solution, and then to help them bring the council on board.

This doesn't need to be an expensive process either. We understand that, at the initial stages of a project's planning journey, there is little budget to play with and that you don't necessarily need a formatted report and a CAD rendered plan.  Instead, you need distilled advice, risks and opportunities of the site from external views to give you a better handle for your initial capacity assets – the key points set out on a sketch plan and a call to talk it through. If all goes well, you can come back for the polished, public report for early pre-app discussions or representations to the development plan.

Adding in ecology and arboriculture to the mix can add further insight. As an example, we regularly work on large strategic greenfield sites. These sites are often crossed by a network of hedgerows and trees. These are valuable landscape features, but in the masterplanning process, something has to give. Which ones can go and which ones have to stay? The Arboriculturalists and Ecologists can provide a hierarchy of importance, identifying the defunct, species poor category C examples, rather than the species rich, tree laden category A, or, even more important: the veteran tree? That allows you and the masterplanner understand where those quality eggs are.

Early environmental due diligence may feel like a drain of scarce resources at the start of the project, when the available pot to spend is small, but it can pay back hugely down the line and help you avoid making a Fabergé omelette.