New rules in Bath could soon ban “family homes” from being turned into HMOs.
A bedroom at an HMO property | Library image
Houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) — the legal name for shared houses where groups of unrelated adults live together sharing facilities — are often occupied by students, single people, professionals, and low-income workers.
But councillors have warned that affordable homes for families being turned into HMOs is exacerbating the city’s housing crisis.
Now Bath & North East Somerset Council is proposing a ban on three-bedroom “family homes” in the city from being turned into HMOs.
If adopted, it would come into effect as part of the council’s new local plan, a major document which sets out the council’s planning policies and where new developments should go until 2043.
Matt McCabe, the council’s cabinet member for built environment, housing, and sustainable development, said Bath faced “problems which no other city in the country faces” when it came to housing because the city’s World Heritage Site status meant the city could not be expanded into the green hills that surround it.
He said: “If an affordable home is converted to an HMO, we can’t replace it. There is nowhere in the city now to build houses.
“Hence a new policy direction to sit alongside our existing policy direction. We have got to stop the loss of this housing stock from the city.”
He was speaking at a meeting of the council cabinet on 25th September, specially convened to put the new local plan options document out to public consultation.
The proposed HMO policy is one small part of the 448-page document, which is mainly focussed on to put the 27,000 homes which the government has told Bath and North East Somerset Council it needs to build.
The new proposed rule would ban three-bedroom homes of a certain defined size from being converted into HMOs. The rule could either be applied citywide or only in the most affordable areas.
The council last tried to limit HMOs in 2022, when it adopted a policy designed to prevent areas having too high a concentration of HMOs.
But the council warned this just had displaced the creation of HMOs from the areas of main concentration and out into the wider city, where housing is more affordable, leading to more affordable homes across the city being turned into HMOs.
In a debate over HMOs at a full council meeting on 24th September, Councillor Jess David (Moorlands, Liberal Democrat) said: “Over the last six years, I have seen a steady stream of planning applications in the Moorlands area seeking to convert family homes — typically two or three bedrooms — into houses of multiple occupation.
“Typically, these involve losing the living room to create additional bedrooms, and in some cases, extensions to create larger six bedroom HMOs.”
She added: “This trend is directly exacerbating Bath’s housing crisis and with every small family house that becomes an HMO, we reduce the supply of suitable homes for other families to rent or buy.”
Less than a week later, plans to turn a three-bedroom home in Twerton into a six-bedroom HMO came before the council’s planning committee and were unanimously turned down on the grounds of overdevelopment.
Planning committee member Councillor Paul Crossley (Southdown, Liberal Democrat) said: “We can’t just say it must stay as a family house because that’s not a planning consideration for the moment.
“But it is a real issue and it is something as a council that we have to much more seriously address — and at speed, because of the speed with which these applications are coming in.”
John Wimperis, Local Democracy Reporter
