The change of use for an existing 4-bedroom house to a 9-bedroom HMO in Oxford has been approved facilitating enhanced, high quality, lower cost housing for working professionals in the local area.
This conversion will mostly see alterations made inside of the property in order to provide the increase in the number of bedrooms and bring in open-plan living. The only external alterations will be the addition of roof lights which will not be visible from the street scene.
ET Planning were able to demonstrate in this planning application, on behalf of their client, that this change of use was appropriate for the area. They explained that the conversion is in support of the National Planning Policy Framework which demonstrates in Paragraph 59 that the Government has an objective to boost the supply of housing.
ET Planning also reviewed local law which dictates that there should not be an over saturation of HMO’s within the area. ET Planning applied this formula where up to 20% of the buildings within a 100m of the site could be properties classed as HMOs. They found that the current representation of HMOs within 100m of the site was only at 6.9% and so this demonstrated that the change of use was acceptable in principle.
As part of the application, ET Planning also went on to review the impact of the conversion on the character of the area and found that as very little external alterations were to be made, this would not cause a detrimental impact to the street scene or local residents.
As the development made efficient use of land, and met all the local law criteria, Oxford City Council were able to approve the application by delegation.
This is a fantastic result for the clients of ET Planning and just shows that a vision for development is possible, even in a major city centre like Oxford.