Coliving Pulse #012 — Councils Are Writing Coliving Into Policy While Closing the Door on Converted HMOs

Planning consultancy Lichfields reviewed 84 local planning authorities in England and found that adopted policies and guidance address coliving in 7 per cent of them. That rises to more than 25 per cent once emerging plans and draft guidance are included. Salford and Watford already refer to coliving in adopted local plans; Birmingham, Leeds, Brighton and Hove, and Chelmsford have supplementary guidance. Schemes and applications are appearing in Manchester, Leeds, Brighton, Bristol and Birmingham, among other regional cities.

The emerging policies generally support coliving in accessible locations and established centres, and cover affordable housing, room sizes, shared facilities and building management — though the amount of detail varies a great deal between authorities. Adam Donovan, a planning director at Lichfields, framed it as councils planning for different housing types, and made the point that matters most for a developer: setting expectations early lets you take them into account when you are still choosing sites rather than after you have bought one.

Now the number. You will see this reported as a quarter of English councils backing coliving, and three separate things are being compressed to get there. The 25 per cent includes emerging plans and draft guidance, which are not policy yet; the adopted figure is 7 per cent. The review covered 84 authorities, not the three hundred-odd local planning authorities in England, so the base is a sample and not the country. And "addressing" coliving in a plan is not the same as supporting it — a policy that sets minimum room sizes and management requirements is a constraint as much as a welcome.

None of that makes the finding less important. Seven per cent with adopted policy, on a product that barely existed outside London five years ago, is fast. It is simply a different claim from the one the headline makes, and we would rather publish both numbers than the one that travels.

Read this beside what we have been covering since issue seven and the shape appears. Telford withdrew an additional licensing designation on procedural grounds. Liverpool moved to remove permitted development rights for small HMOs across the city, with the council's own study showing conversions grew 15 per cent inside the existing control area and 57 per cent outside it. Stoke, Portsmouth and others have been tightening. We described that, correctly, as councils restricting shared living.

That reading was half the picture. The same authorities writing coliving into their local plans are the ones restricting house conversions. These are not opposing impulses. They are one policy direction with two instruments: push shared living out of unmanaged converted family houses, and into purpose-built, professionally managed, planning-consented buildings where the council sets room sizes, amenity and management standards.

For an operator that is the most consequential framing available right now, and it cuts both ways. The converted-house route — the cheapest entry into this sector and the one most small operators use — is being closed deliberately, street by street. The purpose-built route is being opened, with conditions attached that only capitalised operators can meet. If you are running three converted houses and planning a fourth, the policy environment is not neutral toward you; it is selecting against your model and for somebody else's.

The honest caveat: this is a reading of a pattern across separate councils, not a stated national policy. Nobody has announced it. We are describing what the decisions add up to, and we will say so if the next quarter's decisions do not fit.

In issue ten we said we were watching Liverpool's cabinet decision. It happened, and then it stopped. The cabinet approved the new Article 4 Directions last week. The decision was then called in by opposition Liberal Democrat members, which puts it on hold, and an extraordinary session of the culture and economy scrutiny committee meets next Thursday to decide whether the cabinet should look again.

The reason for the call-in is the part worth knowing. The opposition, led by Cllr Carl Cashman, did not argue the directions went too far. They argued they did not go far enough, and called for the whole city to be included immediately rather than in stages. Cllr Hetty Wood, cabinet member for housing, has said members would seek a city-wide approach next year.

So the delay in Liverpool is not landlords resisting control. It is councillors competing over how quickly to impose it. For anyone modelling planning risk on converted HMO stock in the city, the staged twelve-month runway we flagged in issue ten is now less reliable, not more — the political pressure is toward compression.

The underlying mechanics, for readers outside England: under national permitted development rights, converting a home to accommodate three to six people can generally happen without planning permission unless an Article 4 Direction is in force. Larger HMOs above six people already require permission. Article 4 is the instrument that removes the small-conversion exemption, which is exactly the route most small coliving operators have used.

Colchester Riverside Ltd wants to demolish the empty Fairfax House and Digby House on North Station Road and part-demolish and convert Century House, delivering 340 coliving units across a rebuilt four-storey Digby House and a six-storey Fairfax House, with Century House keeping its ground-floor shops and gaining 30 private-rented flats above. London developer Elder would deliver it. It would be Colchester's first coliving scheme.

Members of the CO1 North Residents' Association are campaigning against it. Their objection is not aesthetic. Ron Suffield's complaint is that residents in a conservation area are held to the council's planning guidance while the council itself appears willing to set that guidance aside, and that their objections have gone nowhere. Whether or not the planning judgement is right, the grievance is procedural — about whether the rules apply symmetrically.

That is worth noticing alongside the Lichfields finding. Policy support at plan level does not deliver consent at application level, and the gap between the two is where local legitimacy gets spent. A council that writes coliving into its local plan and then appears to residents to bend its own conservation guidance for the first scheme has made the next ten applications harder, not easier.

Thursday's Liverpool scrutiny session, and whether the city-wide timetable is pulled forward from next year.

Whether the Lichfields 7 per cent moves. The adopted figure is the one that binds; the 25 per cent is a forecast of it.

Whether any council that has adopted a coliving policy refuses an application under it. Policy is tested at the first refusal, not at adoption.

This issue is late and it broke a commitment we published. Issue eleven, which came out on Saturday 17 October, said in writing that the Monday slot had not moved and that the next issue would be Monday 19 October as usual. It was not. Nothing went out that Monday, and this issue lands on Saturday 24 October instead.

We are not going to explain that away. We said a specific date on a page that is still live, the date passed, and the reason is simply that the issue was not produced. The weekly promise on our Pulse page is a promise about our operation, and this is the second time in a month that the day named has not held.

The useful response is not an apology, it is a decision about which day is real. That decision has now been made: Pulse moves to Saturday, and the Pulse page says so. Monday held for three issues and then stopped: #008, #009 and #010 all landed on it, #011 and #012 landed on a Saturday, and the Monday between them produced nothing. Saturday is the day the work has actually happened lately, and a day we hold is worth more than a day that sounded better.