Councillor's warning over new flats laws

Plans unveiled by the Coalition Government mean anyone looking to turn a house into flats housing up to six occupants, so-called houses of multiple occupation (HMO), will not need to apply for planning permission.

Housing minister Grant Shapps wants to encourage development and remove red tape which restricts landlords, but Cllr Godfrey Daniel, chairman of both the Hastings Borough Council (HBC) and East Sussex County Council planning committees, has warned the move could have dire consequences.

Hastings and St Leonards already has four times as many HMOs as the national average, with 2,770, or eight per cent of the town's housing stock.

A 2007 survey showed that less than two thirds of the HMOs met the decent homes standard, and Cllr Daniel is worried about the effect the new rules will have on residents .

He said: "People will be shocked to find out that, under the guise of the Government not wishing "to create unnecessary costs for landlords", the opportunity for residents to oppose HMOs in their own road may not exist.

"The only way to control such developments will be for local authorities to use something called an 'Article 4 direction', but this will be very difficult to introduce for most parts of our town."

But announcing the changes Mr Shapps said: "I'm not going to create unnecessary costs for landlords, which puts the supply of rented homes at risk. That's why I'm giving councils the power to decide whether to use the planning system to control the spread of shared housing where it is a problem."

The changes should come into force in October and Cllr Daniel said he and his colleagues would be pressing HBC officers to try and minimise their effect.