Office to residential conversions across the UK are falling below national standards, according to new research from RICS.
The research commissioned by RICS and written by teams from UCL and the University of Sheffield surveyed five local authorities – Camden, Croydon, Leeds, Leicester and Reading – with high rates of permitted development schemes and found that only 30% of 568 the sites visited were delivering units which met national space standards.
The housing also suffered from low-quality design and poor locations for residential amenity.
The report added that local public-funded infrastructure was also suffering as permitted developments do not make Section 106 contributions and do not require full planning permission.
It found that local authorities lost £4.1m due to reduced planning fees.
Recommendations from the report include: amending CIL regulations so that all developments creating new residential units are liable; government reregulation; or the introduction of safeguards to the prior approvals process such as adding minimum space standards.
RICS policy manager Abdul Choudhury said: “Permitted development rights have the potential to ease the UK housing crisis and speed up delivery of developments by reducing regulatory burdens.
“However, regulatory safeguards are necessary to mitigate negative aspects of development and to uphold minimum standards. By bypassing regulations, the policy may create more problems than it solves.
“In some areas, over-conversion has produced a shortage of office units which has pushed up their costs. Central government policies can dilute local planning authority powers, which seems contradictory to the localism agenda government have championed in the past.
“Government needs to re-examine the policy and ask itself, how useful are different iterations of permitted development to local communities as a whole, rather than blindly focusing on numbers.”
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