Council’s LEP meetings are now largely devoted to tidying up inconsistencies that have been identified by the NSW Department of Planning and Infrastructure, prior to the public display period and final adoption of the document.
One change that may be of interest to local residents was the requirement to remove Dual Occupancy dwellings from the list of allowable land uses in rural and environmental zones, including the E4 zone that will be applicable to rural residential areas. This requirement arose because the planning instruments that will underpin the new PLEP assume that a Dual Occupancy development will be accompanied by the subdivision of the property in question. Subdivision, however, is generally not permitted in current rural residential areas. The regulations applicable to a Secondary Dwelling development, which is still allowed, have, however, been refined to embrace what would previously have been identified as a Dual Occupancy development.
It may be of interest to some property owners to know that, whereas the current Dual Occupancy development rules restrict the size of the second dwelling on a property to just 150 m², there will be no such restriction on the size of a Secondary Dwelling development under the new PLEP.
There is no provision for more than two dwelling houses on a property in the E4 zone.
Comment from Colin
11 November 2011 @ 20:41
I am a little concerned about the recent article in the Bulletin regarding secondary dwellings (dual occupancy). I live on a property with an acre building envelope and, in accordance with the previous LEP, we purposely built our first property less than 150 square, so that our future property could be somewhat larger and the one we are in now would become accommodation for my elderly parents. I have added the clause at the bottom of this e-mail for completeness.
As I read the draft proposal, we would now be restricted to a secondary dwelling of equivalent size. I can see that there would have been opposition to restricting the second house to be smaller than 150 square and therefore the 100% decision, but as it stands this leaves us somewhat disadvantaged. (ie Our neighbour can put another 300 square property within his building envelope.)
Should the 100% ruling be accepted I would wish a caveat to read “unless the first property is less than 150 square”.
Your thoughts and clarification would be gratefully received given our predicament.
32. Dual Occupancy
Dual occupancy development means development which results in the erection of two dwellings, one of which having a maximum floor area (excluding vehicle accommodation and verandahs) of 150 square metres, on one allotment of land. Such development may be carried out through the erection of an additional building or through modification of an existing dwelling house.
Reply from Pete
12 November 2011 @ 00:04
The thing that is probably not obvious in all of this is that the ‘first’ and ‘second’ dwellings are not constrained temporally—that is, the larger of your dwellings can be taken as the ‘first’ or primary dwelling, regardless of whether it was built first or second. The other dwelling, the so-called ‘second’ or secondary dwelling, can then be anything up to 100% of the size of the primary dwelling.
What this means, in effect, is that there is no restriction at all, beyond those applying to any other development in the relevant area, on the size of the secondary dwelling. For the purpose of this clause, the primary dwelling is always the largest dwelling, regardless of when it was built.
The change arises because the law underpinning the new planning instrument (LEP) assumes that a dual occupancy development will lead to subdivision. In most cases in Palerang, in current rural residential areas (the so-called Rural 1(d) Zone), [further] subdivision is prohibited, so dual occupancy developments, under the new planning regime, would be inappropriate.
The State has given Council very little flexibility in how it can define the size of a secondary dwelling—we can only limit it to a percentage of the size of the primary dwelling. After much discussion of the implications of various options, Council decided that the only reasonable approach, under the present State government mandated procedure, was to effectively not restrict the size of the secondary dwelling at all.