Developers will be able to demolish offices without planning permission and replace them with homes under changes to permitted development rights.
The amendments, announced by housing and planning minister Brandon Lewis this week, will also make office-to-resi conversions under PDR a permanent fixture of the planning process and will enable change of use of light industrial buildings and launderettes to homes.
Lewis said the measures meant government could “tap into the potential of under-used buildings to offer new homes for first-time buyers”.
The move extends the controversial scheme, which has led to more than 4,000 homes being created since its inception in May 2013, but at the expense of a substantial loss of office space.
The demolition changes will be aimed at stopping the conversion of offices deemed unsuitable for direct residential conversions.
Charles Mills, partner at Daniel Watney, said: “It is a positive move. The challenge with many office conversions is the mismatch of floorplates needed for decent-sized flats and low ceiling heights, which can make living space feel cramped.”
It is expected that demolition will be restricted to offices that are no longer fit for purpose and that new development will have to match the massing of the original scheme.
Pat Hayes, executive director for regeneration and housing at Ealing council, said: “The provision to allow demolition and rebuild makes a flawed concept slightly less bad, as it may prevent truly awful conversions, although it will lead to less housing delivery than schemes going through the proper planning process.”
Announced alongside the Housing and Planning Bill on 13 October, the new regulations also clarified that developers will now have three years to complete schemes from the date of prior approval.
“This will considerably settle the nerves of developers anxious to try to meet an otherwise arbitrary deadline of May next year,” said Ian Coomber, partner at Stiles Harold Williams.
The 17 areas granted exemptions from PDR when it was first announced – including the City of London and Kensington & Chelsea – will have until May 2019 to decide whether they wish to make an Article 4 direction to stop change of use without planning consent.
Article 4 directions allow councils to ban conversions in areas where development would be seen as detrimental, such as in the London borough of Croydon, where more than 2m sq ft of office space has been lost.
Key measures in the Housing and Planning Bill
The government’s Housing and Planning Bill was released on Tuesday, starting a “national crusade to transform generation rent into generation buy”.
Key measures include:
• 200,000 starter homes: a legal duty on councils to provide starter homes at a 20% discount to market value for first-time buyers on all reasonably sized developments
• Local plans intervention: for councils that have not laid out strategies by 2017
• Pay to stay: ensuring tenants on higher incomes living in social housing have a rent that reflects their income
• Sale of high-value council homes: duty on local authorities to release high-value homes when they become vacant
• Automatic planning permission: in principle on brownfield sites, particularly to bring forward public sites with contamination issues
• CPO changes: to assist in bringing more brownfield land into the system
• Registers of land within local authorities
• Planning reforms to support small builders: councils must allocate land to meet a national target of 20,000 self-built homes a year by 2020
• Combating rogue landlords: council powers to blacklist and ban those who act illegally, including a database of those acting illegally
