Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) Policy Update

Despite motions from Maidstone Borough Council's Planning Committee, and other forums, seeking the urgent development of planning policies that would enable some control over quantity and quality of Houses in Multiple Occupation in the Borough, the previous Conservative administration at Maidstone Council failed to act on these requests.

Indeed, the then Conservative Government at Westminster further compounded an already challenging situation by changing the influential National Planning Policy Framework by removing the national policy 'hook' for managing over concentrations of HMOs within specific communities.

This policy malaise ended with the ousting of the Borough Council's Tory leadership in May 2024. Within days of the new council administration coming into office, the cabinet member for Planning (and local Fant resident) Tony Harwood instructed planning officers to prepare an ambitious HMO Supplementary Planning Document (SPD).

All the required supporting evidence and surveys have now been gathered and the SPD is currently at a draft stage and undergoing internal scrutiny by Development Management, Housing, Legal and those other specialist teams who will need to make this document work for them.

As regards current planning applications, these must be determined strictly in accordance with prevailing national and council policies. Any deviation from this quasi-judicial framework by Planning Committee would likely result in an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate, where the absence of local policy would significantly reduce the likelihood of a decision to refuse being upheld and the risk of punitive costs against the public purse. This means that until the draft HMO SPD is adopted, the Borough Council has very little room for manoeuvre.

However, we can now confirm that the HMO SPD and a covering report will go before the Borough Council's Planning Policy Advisory Committee on 5th March, followed by Cabinet on 19th March.
Assuming all goes well at both the Policy Advisory Committee and Cabinet, the Borough Council will commence the four week public consultation on 31st March.
Allowing for the resolution of any issues raised by key stakeholders and the wider public, this will enable the HMO SPD to be published and start operating in late spring/early summer - thus filling the HMO policy void that the new administration inherited. 

Council planners sometimes get a bad press, but the extent of local research and volume of empirical evidence required to support the development of a document that can stand up to inevitable challenge was significant and we thank them.