British Dog Fields partnership with Evolve Planning and Design is going into its 3rd year working on a significant number of planning applications for dog fields, and it’s personal.
I first came across Stuart when we were in a pickle, trying to buy land for a dog field but constantly finding ourselves stumbling – stuck in the catch 22 so many people find themselves in – we couldn’t guarantee that we’d get planning permission so it was an enormous financial risk.
The team at Evolve stuck with us through several painful purchase attempts, saved us from ourselves and our mad ambition on a number of occasions, and were in our corner when we finally found a plot of land that worked for us. Fast forward a few years and Evolve were the planning consultants that handled our planning application getting us approval on the estimated determination date (unheard of!).
British Dog Fields and Evolve – Our Planning Consultants
In 2021 British Dog Fields were looking for a planning consultant partner and it wasn’t proving easy. Wading through the ‘yes-men’ was the most surprising challenge.
We set a trap/challenge and I do not apologise for that. We picked a plot that was not only unsuitable as a dog field but also had a number of not-so-obvious planning hurdles attached to it. We put it out to over 15 leading rural planning consultancies and independent planning agents across the UK – some of whom had experience with dog fields.
Only 1 flagged the snakes in the grass and we’ve worked with them since that day. The funny thing is, they didn’t know that happened and unless they’re reading this, they still don’t!
I honestly didn’t expect so many of the agencies and consultants we approached to blindly and confidently say they could help, and what was so frustrating was that all of those agencies would have taken our money, failed to gain consent and would never have warned us about how unrealistic our prospects were.
Don’t get me wrong – there are great planning agents out there gaining consent for dog fields but what we do is so incredibly niche and we believe it deserves concentrated effort which is what makes our partnership unique – getting the design right (this is your business) and gaining planning permission for that design – that’s what matters.
We have libraries of information and resources about dog field planning and we are the geekiest scholars of this topic – we nailed a peg to the wall and we hung everything on it.
Partnering with Evolve as our planning consultants was the best business decision we’ve made since British Dog Fields started and we’re proud to partner with them.
If you want to know more about getting planning permission for a dog field, please read more about that here. of if you would like to get in touch with Evolve, visit their website here for more informartion about their services.
If you are serious about setting up a field and would like some advice about the early stages of setting up you can find more information about our consultancy services here.