Coliving Pulse #008 — London Offers Coliving a Fast Track, and the Price Is Affordable Housing On Site

The draft London Plan proposes a route change for Large-scale Purpose-built Shared Living — LSPBSL, the planning term for what everyone else calls coliving. Today these schemes ordinarily go through the viability-tested planning route and make a payment towards conventional affordable housing. Under the proposals, a scheme that instead provides conventional affordable housing on site at the relevant threshold could qualify for the Fast Track Route.

The Fast Track exists to give greater planning certainty to developments that meet the affordable housing and other policy criteria, and it removes the need for the detailed viability evidence that the viability-tested process demands. For an operator or developer, that is the whole point: viability testing is where months and consultancy fees go.

Two other proposed requirements are worth reading closely because they are operational, not architectural. Shared living schemes would have to be designed around communal living, with internal and external spaces intended to encourage social interaction alongside functional private areas. And large-scale shared living would be required to operate under single management, supported by a management plan covering continued quality and maintenance, security, safety and service arrangements. A planning policy asking for a management plan is a planning policy that has understood coliving is an operating business.

The date that matters: the wider draft London Plan was published on 16 July 2026 and the consultation runs until 15 October 2026. That is roughly two and a half weeks from this issue. These are proposals, not adopted requirements — but the window to say anything about them is open now and closes soon, and we suspect most operators do not know it exists.

We said last week that we had seen reports of a Nottingham consent but could not open a source we were willing to cite. We can now. Wavensmere Homes and Redford Developments have secured approval for Waterway House, a 300-studio coliving scheme on a 0.25-hectare site off Crocus Street in the Canalside Quarter, near Nottingham railway station. Corstorphine & Wright is the architect, Turley the planning consultant, and VervLife has been selected to operate the building, which will be managed around the clock. It is Nottingham's first purpose-designed purely coliving scheme.

The building is five storeys, with self-contained studios carrying en-suite bathrooms and kitchenettes, and a ground floor given over largely to communal amenity — gym, communal kitchen and dining, games and cinema rooms, lounges, coworking and meeting rooms, with a padel court and outdoor social space at roof level.

Two details carry the story. First, the scheme was reworked after its January 2026 submission to align with the council's newly adopted guidance document on coliving, and 25 units were removed so the remaining studios could all be made larger. That is a council-level coliving policy reshaping a scheme before it reaches committee — the same force the draft London Plan is formalising, arriving in a regional city through guidance rather than a plan.

Second, the procedure. At the 23 September committee, concerns were raised that councillors were being asked to approve the development without knowing how much the developer would contribute under Section 106. The scheme was agreed anyway, with final sign-off delegated to the council's director of planning and transport following consultation with the committee chair, vice chair and an opposition member. The obligation was not resolved in the room; it was moved out of it.

Read the two together and they describe the same pressure point from opposite ends. London is proposing to make the obligation explicit and to pay for it with certainty: provide conventional affordable housing on site, skip the viability argument. Nottingham could not settle the obligation at committee and delegated it, consenting the scheme while leaving the number to be negotiated later.

This is the question coliving consent now turns on almost everywhere, and it changes how a comparable should be read. Last issue we covered McLaren's 280-unit approval at Fish Island, which arrived with 44 affordable homes attached. At the time we flagged that anyone modelling a London scheme on a consented comparable should check whether that comparable carried an affordable obligation. The draft London Plan explains why that check matters: under the proposals, on-site affordable housing is precisely what buys the faster route.

The practical consequence for an operator underwriting a site is that the affordable position is no longer a late-stage line item to be negotiated down. It is an input that determines which planning route you are on, how long consent takes, and how much viability evidence you have to fund. Model it at the start or model it twice.

Last issue we said we were watching for signs that other councils had read the Telford outcome, where an additional HMO licensing designation catching three-and-four-person shared houses was revoked in full after a challenge to how the consultation was run.

Two more HMO licensing headlines appeared this week and both looked at first like a second council backing down. They are not. Checked against the NRLA's own newsroom, which carries the Telford case and no other, both are further coverage of the same Telford decision — including the argument that the scheme duplicated the incoming national landlord register.

So the watch item is still open rather than resolved. One council revoking a designation on procedural grounds is a precedent; it is not yet a pattern, and calling it one this week would have been the easier and worse thing to write. We will keep watching, and the date still worth holding is 15 December 2026, when the West Midlands becomes the first region required to join the national landlord database.

Watkin Jones completed the second and final phase of Tai Afon at Central Quay in Cardiff, a £200 million build-to-rent development delivered for L&G. The final 316 apartments follow 402 delivered in May, taking the scheme to 718 homes; Watkin Jones describes it as the largest build-to-rent development completed in Wales. We read build-to-rent completions because the amenity specification is converging with ours — this one carries coworking, private dining, a cinema, gym, yoga and spin studios and roof terraces, which is a coliving amenity list at apartment scale.

The 15 October close of the draft London Plan consultation, and whether any operator body responds on the LSPBSL provisions rather than leaving the field to developers and planning consultants.

Whether the Nottingham Section 106 lands at a number that would still have supported the scheme's underwriting — delegated obligations are where consented schemes quietly become unviable.

Still open from last issue: a second council revoking an additional licensing designation. One case is a precedent, not a trend.

Pulse moves to Monday from this issue. Naming a day is a stricter promise than saying weekly, and we are making it deliberately: a brief that arrives on a predictable morning is worth more than one that arrives eventually. Every issue stays archived, and every correction we have made stays logged.

Updated the same day: the Nottingham section originally ran on a summary. We then opened the original local report and rewrote the section from it, adding the 25 units removed to comply with the council's newly adopted coliving guidance and the detail of how the Section 106 decision was delegated. Nothing in the first version was wrong; it was thinner than it needed to be, and we would rather say that than quietly swap the text.