Councils are strangely reluctant to let people turn empty shops and offices into homes. You would think that in the middle of a housing shortage they would jump at it. Plenty of the time they do the opposite, and a refused change of use to residential is one of the decisions we see most.
This is firmly our territory, too. My Planning Appeal is not only a householder service; we take on every sort of Part 1 appeal, and change of use is one of the most common. (If you are subdividing a house into flats rather than converting a commercial building, we cover that in a separate guide.)
What ‘change of use’ actually means
Not every change needs planning permission. The use of a building is sorted into classes, and moving around within a class is free of the planning system. The catch is that homes sit in a class of their own, so turning almost anything else into a dwelling is a material change of use, and that needs permission.
There are two ways to get it. For a lot of commercial buildings there is now a permitted development route, called Class MA, that lets you convert from the broad commercial class straight to residential through a lighter-touch “prior approval” rather than a full application. Since the rules were relaxed there is no longer a floorspace limit, and the building no longer has to have stood empty first. Where that route is not open to you, because the building is listed, or sits in an area where the council has withdrawn the right, or because your scheme goes beyond what prior approval covers, you need full planning permission.
Why they refuse a full application
When you do need full permission, the reasons for refusal come from a familiar list.
The commonest is the loss of the existing use. Councils protect employment land and shopping frontages, and they will resist losing an office, a workshop or a shop even where it has stood empty and unloved for years. Expect to be told the site should be safeguarded for business, or that losing the shop would harm the vitality of the town centre.
The detail matters here. Many town centres have designated primary and secondary shopping frontages, with local policies that resist the loss of retail units or cap the proportion that can turn over to other uses. Employment sites are protected in much the same way, often by a policy requiring the premises to be marketed for business use for a set period before any change is entertained. A refusal on this ground therefore rests on a specific local policy, and the first question at appeal is whether your scheme actually falls foul of it, or whether the policy is out of date or being applied far too rigidly to a unit that nobody wants.
Then there are the living conditions of the future residents. A flat carved out of a commercial building can end up with poor daylight, no outdoor space, or a main window facing a blank wall. If it sits above or beside a pub, a takeaway or a workshop, the council will worry about noise and disturbance reaching the new homes. The units also have to meet the national space standards, so anything cramped is exposed.
After that come the usual suspects: parking and highways, and the general amenity points that attach themselves to almost any application.
Why so many of these refusals are worth appealing
Because most of them are judgement calls, and judgement is exactly what an inspector is there to weigh up again.
Take the loss of employment. If the building has sat empty and unwanted for a couple of years, the claim that it is vital business space starts to look thin, and marketing evidence showing nobody wanted it can carry real weight on appeal. The living-conditions objections are often just as soft. A unit the council calls poky can turn out to be perfectly acceptable once you look at it properly, and noise worries can usually be designed out with the right glazing and layout. An inspector, well away from the local politics of losing a familiar shop, tends to take a more practical view than the committee did.
If you went the prior approval route
Prior approval is a different animal. On a Class MA application the council can only refuse on a short, defined list of matters, such as flood risk, contamination, transport, noise reaching the future occupiers and whether every habitable room would get adequate natural light, and the appeal is confined to whichever test it says you failed. Because those cases work so differently, we deal with them in a dedicated guide: Class MA prior approval refused: can you appeal?
What to do next
Read the reasons for refusal and work out which camp you are in: a full-application refusal built on planning judgement, or a prior-approval refusal on one defined point. Either can be challenged, and in our experience change-of-use refusals are among the more winnable, because so many of them come down to a council’s reluctance rather than a real planning problem.
My Planning Appeal handles Part 1 appeals of every kind for a fixed fee of £399, householder or not. If you have been refused a change of use to residential, send us the decision and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth fighting. We win more than half the appeals we take on.