Greenwich Council plans a crackdown on family homes being converted into bedsits – but anxious residents could have to wait as long as three years for change to take place because of national planning laws.
There are more than 800 licensed homes of multiple occupation (HMOs) in the borough, and the number is rising with residents being alarmed after controversial applications in areas such as Eltham and Shooters Hill.
On Wednesday night, both Labour and Conservative councillors joined forces to state their support for a change in the rules, including an “oversaturation policy” to make it easier to stop neighbourhoods being dominated by HMOs. It also called for licensing enforcement to be stepped up.
While the housing crisis means some professionals are now having to resort to HMOs because they cannot find anywhere else to live, they have been blamed for a rise in parking and antisocial behaviour, as well as reducing the borough’s supply of family homes.
Fears have grown that landlords are targeting large family homes in Greenwich because the council has relatively weak rules about HMO conversions, meaning that planning committees – which have to abide by strict rules – have found it hard to refuse them.
Greenwich’s Labour-run council has said it plans to strengthen the rules in its new local plan – the legal framework by which it decides what kinds of development it wants in the borough. The current local plan was adopted in July 2014 but drawn up in the years before that.
A draft local plan will be released for public consultation in October, and the council hopes to submit it for examination by planning inspectors in December next year, according to an answer given at a council meeting last month.
But then it will have to go through a public hearing and another consultation before it is approved. Neighbouring Lewisham is in the process of adopting a local plan, but if the same timescales are followed – Lewisham submitted its plan to inspectors in December 2023 – Greenwich may not get its new local plan until October 2028.
Greenwich itself has been a little more optimistic, predicting in past consultation documents that the process will be complete in 2027.
The Tories put forward a motion about HMOs on Wednesday night, but Labour wanted to scrap this and put forward their own. After tetchy and at times farcical exchanges with council leader Anthony Okereke, they agreed to compromise, combining their motions. The Tories signed up to a line praising the Labour government’s planning reforms, Labour agreed to delete a line criticising the Conservatives.
“As of July 1, there were 774 licensed HMOs in the borough,” Matt Hartley, the Conservative leader said. “In fact, that’s already gone up since the motion was submitted, to 811. And that speaks to the growing trends that we are seeing this upsurge in applications for HMO conversion. And that’s just the figures for licensed properties.
“This is a big upward surge, and that has, as we all know, been accompanied by more and more understandable concern about the spread of HMOs and the loss of family homes, from our residents because there is a need for family housing and we are losing more and more of it.
Hartley said the council did not have “the powers and the tools that it needs to minimise the loss of family homes”.
“And that’s important because the spread of HMO conversions are changing the character of our neighborhoods effectively, forever. And as any of our residents who has been through it will tell you, opposing an HMO application through the planning system can feel an intensely frustrating exercise.”
Rachel Taggart-Ryan, the Labour cabinet member for community safety and enforcement, supported the merged motion and said the council was already doing a lot.
“We’ve made it a compulsory rule that you need planning permission [for HMOs] and we’ve gone beyond what is statutorily required to ensure that every HMO needs a licence, regardless of its size,” she said. “And we’re doing a lot of work on enforcement and compliance, and I think that’s really to be celebrated.”
The merged motion was passed unanimously by Labour, Tory, Green and independent councillors.
Hartley said after the meeting: “The new local plan gives us an opportunity to put in place the stronger planning protections against HMOs that our communities need. We need to take this opportunity now, as there won’t be another for many, many years. So I am pleased that Conservative and Labour councillors were able to strike a last-minute deal in the council chamber that enabled these measures to be voted on unanimously.”
“It’s not always possible to put party politics one side, but when it is, we should seize the chance, as we have done on HMOs – it’s what residents deserve and expect.”
🏠 You can check if an HMO in your street is licensed. Greenwich Council has a confidential hotline to report unlicensed HMOs.
Updated at 9.30pm to include details of the current local plan and the council’s own timeline for adoption of a new plan.
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