Local authorities may soon have the power to declare their own ‘no-go’ zones for privately rented shared houses.
This would replace the current need to obtain planning permission if a landlord wanted to rent out an existing family home to a group of tenants such as students, nurses or young professionals.
But the Residential Landlords Association (RLA) fears the government’s policy of reducing the burden of national legislation on the sector could create a local mass of new red tape.
The organisation is now lobbying the new housing minister Grant Shapps on his planned revision of the new planning regulations that came into force three months ago.
The association has already attacked the current position. As it stands a landlord with planning permission to rent out a shared house, who then lets it to a family, may not be allowed to switch back to a shared house at a later date.
That was part of the former government’s plans to restrict the numbers of small ‘houses in multiple occupation’ (HMOs).
Grant Shapps plans to relax that legislation, but from 1 October he proposes to allow local authorities to apply the rule in areas they consider to have an HMO ‘problem’. The Residential Landlords Association believes this could create ‘no-go HMO zones’.
“The minister has declared his intention to reduce the legislative burden for private sector landlords and he may achieve that at national level,” said 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 is 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.”
Jones says the RLA is looking for two major changes in the minister’s proposal. Firstly, it wants 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, it wants 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,” Jones added. “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.”
