HMO's and Planning Permission
At present, if a Landlord wishes to rent out a family House in Multiple Occupation (HMO), they must obtain planning permission but with a new law billed, Local Authorities may be able to declare geographical areas within their control where this will be forbidden. In essense, this could create HMO no go zones.
The Residential Landlords Association (RLA) are aware that this could cause serious problems for private landlords and are lobbying Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister. It is feared this could cause an awful amount of red tape and beauracy to a sector that has seen massive increases in rules and regulation.
The RLA has recently attacked the position we are in now. At present, if a landlord with planning permission were to rent out an HMO, and were then to let it to a family, they then may not be able to rerent it later in as an HMO.
Grant Shapps plans to relax the previous Governments legislation. This comes from the former Labour Government’s plan to restrict the numbers of small ‘houses in multiple occupation’.
NEW LA Control
Unfortunately, from 1st October, it is proposed to allow local authorities more control. They will probably apply the new rule in areas they think have HMO issues/problems.
“The minister has declared his intention to reduce the legislative burden for private sector landlords and he may achieve that at national level,” says RLA lawyer Richard Jones. “But locally this gives local authorities too much additional power.
“It would still threaten the future of traditional student housing areas, and the local economies that have grown up around them. But it would also throw up a series of anomalies in local housing markets too. What happens, for instance, if a couple are renting a house and decide to take in lodgers? Is that still a domestic let … or does it become an HMO?
“More and more local authorities are approaching private landlords to house the homeless and those in need. Locally landlords need the flexibility to let to a family one year and to a group another year, without the need to have to get planning permission to change backwards and forwards. At the moment there is huge uncertainty as to when planning permission is needed anyway.
“We are looking for two major changes in the minister’s proposal as they will affect areas designated by the local authority for these new controls. Firstly, we want to change the definition of an HMO so that it only applies if there are at least five residents rather than only three which is the case at the moment.
“Secondly, we want to see a ‘preserved right’ introduced so that, even if a local authority does exercise its new powers, a property can be occupied either as a family home or a shared house without any need to obtain separate planning permission.
“This protects the value of existing shared houses. We already have a lot of evidence that in the same street a house which can only be used as a family home could be worth a third less than a house that can be rented out as a shared house.
“We simply want to preserve the right to switch between groups of tenants sharing a house or the domestic use by a family – according to the housing demand at the time.”