A landlord let a family house as a six-bedroom HMO without realising the entire borough sits under an Article 4 direction. An enforcement letter arrived with a hard 24-day deadline. The whole case turned on the percentage of HMOs within fifty metres.
Our client is a small landlord. They own a family-sized house in Hertfordshire and, earlier in the year, started letting it as a six-bedroom shared house — converting the upstairs bathroom into a separate toilet and an additional shower room to make the property work for that number of single occupants. They applied for an HMO licence through the council's Private Housing team, completed a schedule of remedial works, and felt they were doing things by the book.
What they didn't realise — and what most landlords in the same position don't realise — is that the borough sits under a long-standing Article 4 direction removing the usual permitted development right to switch from a standard family dwelling (Use Class C3) to a small HMO (Use Class C4). In the rest of the country, that switch is automatic. Inside an Article 4 area, it needs full planning permission. A planning enforcement officer wrote to the landlord with a strict deadline to submit an application or face formal action.
HMO applications in Article 4 areas live or die by a small number of policy tests. The most important of these is the concentration test: the council's supplementary planning guidance won't normally permit a new HMO if it would push the proportion of HMOs within a 50-metre radius above 20%. Twenty per cent is the line. Below it, the proposal is in play; above it, the council has a near-automatic refusal reason.
The honest answer was that a six-bedroom HMO at this location was always going to struggle. It tipped the area over the concentration cap, it strained the parking standard for the size of property, and the internal space standards for a six-bed HMO would have required substantial reconfiguration even before any neighbour amenity arguments. The risk of refusal at six bedrooms was high.
But there is a route through. The council's policy doesn't automatically catch a five-bedroom HMO — particularly if it can be demonstrated that the property meets the internal space standards comfortably, that parking provision is adequate within the existing curtilage, and that the impact on neighbour amenity is manageable. The five-bedroom version of the same property is a meaningfully different planning proposition.
Our advice to the landlord was clear and unsentimental: don't fight a losing battle on six bedrooms; downsize the proposal to a five-bedroom HMO and reapply on those terms. We are now preparing the full retrospective application package on that basis, including:
The five-bedroom application is also a better long-term proposition for the landlord: smaller, easier to manage, less wear, more compliant, and far less likely to invite an enforcement headache in future.
Alongside the planning statement, we prepared and submitted a full set of scaled architectural drawings — site location plan, block plan, and existing and proposed elevations and floor plans where relevant — giving the case officer a clear, accurate and measurable picture of the development to assess against policy.
Before you let a property as a shared house, find out whether your borough sits under an Article 4 direction. Many do. The 50-metre concentration test, the parking standards, the space standards and the amenity policies are all knowable in advance — and they are all the difference between a compliant investment and a council enforcement file.
HMO enforcement in Article 4 areas is one of the fastest-moving areas of retrospective planning. The deadlines are short, the policy tests are unforgiving, and the right answer is almost always to act quickly and pragmatically rather than dig in. If you've had a letter, call us today.
The deadlines are short. Call us today and we'll act the same day where we can.