Winchester City Council: Dan Wilden is pleased to have secured planning permission for the change of use of a house in Winchester from a small House in Multiple Occupancy (Use Class C4) to a children’s home (Use Class C2).
A change of use of a traditional 3 or 4 bedroom family house to a small children’s home is a proposal we are increasingly seeing – this is our second recent such approval in Winchester. There is often some confusion about whether this is lawful without planning permission and understandably so – whilst there is caselaw on the subject, Planning Inspector’s have reached various different conclusions on appeal. The key case is North Devon District Council v Secretary of State where it was decided that a home where children were the only permanent residents (their adult carers being on a shift rota) could not form a “household” and thus by definition could not be Use Class C3 and must therefore be Use Class C2. However the same case also decided that despite a change from one use class to another it was nonetheless still necessary to assess whether the change of use proposed was a material change of use. And it was acceptable for the decision maker to assess the proposed use as being sufficiently similar to a family home to be not a material change of use. But this is an assessment which has to be made in each individual case. The “material” is key because it is only a material change of use which amounts to development and thus is subject to planning control.
In both the Winchester cases however things were a bit clearer cut because the existing use is a Use Class C4 HMO student house rather than a Use Class C3 family home so planning permission was certainly required – no real question about it potentially being not a material change of use.