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 family home to a small children’s home is a proposal we are increasingly seeing. 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 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 important because it is only a material change of use which amounts to development and thus is subject to planning control.
In this Winchester case however things were a bit clearer cut because the existing use is a Use Class C4 HMO rather than a Use Class C3 family home so planning permission was certainly required. The existing use also politically helped because the site lies in an area which is locally felt to be somewhat overrun with student HMOs.