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The Morton Partnership Ltd

We employed The Morton Partnership for three projects last year. Each was an expensive disaster with The Morton Partnership demonstrating what looks like extraordinary professional incompetence/ignorance/arrogance. 1/Coversion of shed to studio - the morton partnership obtained planning permission to convert a shed to a studio and demonstrated deep ignorance of the planning system. To give just one example - they told us that the council were insisting that the existing the corrugated iron roof be replaced with slate, we pointed out that a/this would look odd as the rest of the roof was iron or pantiles & that this would cost at least £5,000 more than replacing with new corrugated iron. Over several emails the morton partnership insisted this was the only option. After we fired them and appointed someone else and met with the conservation officer she denied she had insisted on slate & agreed that it would look strange & pointed out that planning permission was not needed to replace like with like. We now have a new corrugated roof. 2/Conversion of Granary to House - we commissioned them to apply to convert our granary into a house which they said they thought was possible, several months (& many thousands of pounds) later they submitted an application for a Granny Annex. We told them that we had never wanted a granny annex. they said that the conservation officer had told them several months earlier that it was only possible to convert it to an annex, and that it was pointless to apply for anything else. Had they reported this 'conversation' at the time we would have saved many thousands of pounds and much time. We then appointed a new architect who successfully applied for conversion of the granary to a house. 3/As structural engineers we asked them to look at the damp getting into our house. They asked what we wanted to spend and we said a modest amount. they drew up a scheme that proved very difficult to get anyone to quote for (including all the builders they recommended) with all builders scratching their heads and saying they'd never seen anything like it, after several months we got estimates of between £40-£60k. As we were about to start work a builder found out that the work would need both planning and listed building consent - something that the morton had not told us. the conservation officer's initial response was that this was intrusive & she would not recommend it. In fact we could find no one who thought it was a good idea - perhaps more tellingly we've never seen such a scheme adopted anywhere & none of the many builders who looked at it had either.. We had to conclude, based on our experience, that the morton partnership's expertise does not lie in planning/design or engineering.

By Viktor Wynd - 25 October 2017