Distillery planning permission

Planning and development advice for distillers across Scotland

Scotland gains new distilleries every year, and almost every one of them meets the same wall: the site that makes commercial sense is rural, and rural sites are where the planning system is hardest to satisfy.

We act for distillers directly. Not through an architect, not brought in at the end by someone else, but as your own adviser from the point you are still choosing between sites.

Glen Etive Projects is led by Paul Hughes MRICS MRTPI, a chartered surveyor and a chartered town planner. On a distillery project that matters, because the commercial appraisal and the planning case are written by the same person and therefore say the same thing.

Site selection and appraisal

Before an offer goes in there are three questions: can this site get consent, what is it worth with consent and without, and what will the constraints cost to resolve. We answer all three.

That includes an honest view on the sites that will not work. A distillery site that fails on water, access or landscape is cheaper to walk away from in week one than in month nine.

Planning permission

The full application and everything around it: the planning statement, the case for a countryside or green belt location, pre-application discussion with the planning authority, consultation where a Proposal of Application Notice is required, and the committee presentation where it goes that far.

Most rural distillery applications turn on whether the proposal counts as appropriate rural economic development. That argument has to be built on the development plan and on NPF4, not asserted.

Visitor centres and tourism

The tourism case is usually what carries a rural distillery through planning. It has to be made properly, with visitor numbers, traffic generation, parking, coach movements and local economic benefit set out in terms the council can rely on and defend.

Phasing matters here too. The still house normally comes before the visitor centre, and the application needs to anticipate the second phase rather than leave it to a later battle.

Bonded warehousing

Maturation capacity is a planning problem long before it becomes a commercial one. Warehouse massing, landscape and visual impact, fire separation distances and access all need to be planned around the volume you will hold in fifteen years, not the volume you hold at opening.

Securing warehouse consent early, even where it will not be built for some years, is usually cheaper and safer than returning to the council once production is running.

The constraints that decide distillery applications

Water abstraction and the SEPA licensing that goes with it. Effluent, pot ale and draff disposal. Odour and its effect on nearby housing. Road access and the geometry needed for tanker and HGV movements. Listed or vernacular buildings where an existing steading or mill is being converted. Flood risk where the site sits by the water it depends on.

These are the issues that decide applications, and they are far easier to design around than to argue away after a refusal.

Why come to us directly

The consultants already working on distillery applications are not short of work and have little reason to pass any on. Coming to us directly means you own the relationship, you are not paying a margin on top of a margin, and you have one adviser across both the planning case and the numbers behind it.

Where we work

Distilleries and rural business development across Scotland, including the Highlands, Moray and Speyside, Argyll and the islands, Fife, Perthshire and the Borders. We also work in England, where the planning system and the terminology differ.

Talk to us

If you are looking at a site, or you have an application that has stalled, call Paul Hughes on 0785 256 8874 or email paul@glenetiveprojects.co.uk.