Live Work Unit - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)
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Started - July 2012
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Last activity - Today
Live Work Unit
I have a fairly awkward case at the moment, a live-work unit was approved in a rural area with 40% living accommodation on the upper floor and 60% B1 use on the ground floor. A condition was added that "the development shall be laid out in accordance with the approved plans and any alteration to the B1 use to residential use shall be subject to a further planning application." The plans submitted showed various office spaces on the ground floor and information in the supporting documentation submitted with the application referred to staff to be employed. The external measurements are as approved but the internal layout is different and has a large open plan space with a full fitted kitchen and sofa and dining room table in it. There is only one small room that is in use as an office, the owner basically works from home so this is not a live work unit. We are negotiating with him as he says he will do whatever is needed to put it right rather than go down the route of serving a notice. The problem is how do we make the offender comply with the approval apart from the obvious of complying with the internal arrangement of the ground floor. He has said I will remove the domestic furniture and put desks in it but he doesn’t employ anyone and will effectively continue to work from home in the same manner. If I were to draft an enforcement notice I am unsure as to what I would require him to do in order to comply with the permission he has.
I'm sorry that I don't have an answer for you Lydia, but I am intrigued that you consider this not to be a live-work unit because the chap works from home. I thought that was exactly the idea of a live-work unit - the intention being to save home-work journeys ? If someone living in the unit employs staff who travel in, that rather negates the idea doesn't it ? Office developments with manager's or caretaker's accommodation are different from my understanding of live-work units. As for your particular problem, as I say I don't havea definitive answer, but it would seem to me that the situation is the same as with many other permissions - the permission may preclude other uses, but may not obligate the applicant to actually undertake the use permitted. Your permission identifies the ground floor as employment use and prevents its use as residential accommodation, but is there any condition specifically requiring the employment use to take place (eg prohibiting the residential use unless there is an employment use too) ? I presume there is no condition specifying a minimum number of employees ? If there is no specific requirement to actually use the ground floor for employment use and/or employ a certain number of people, it seems to me that to comply with the permission the chap only needs to lay out the building as shown on the approved plans. In the meantime, I would have thought he is complying with the principle of a live-work unit as I understand it, even if he isn't employing anyone else. I would be very interested in anyone else's thoughts on whether you have to employ other people to be a live-work unit, as this is not my understanding or experience.
Without knowing the exact wording of any conditions it is difficult to advise. You could take the view that if the unit is laid out as per the requirements of the condition you refer to, is available for B1 use and not put to any other use with whatever commercial activity that is occurring taking place on the ground floor then you have effective compliance. You could enforce to cease residential use of the B1 designated space, but don't seem to have a basis for positively requiring office use to take place. Personally I think this type of permission needs an accompanying s106 agreement to secure the activity that makes it acceptable to the planning authority. I am surprised at Martin's stance on this. Live/work units are emphatically not dwellings where someone works from home. That is why they are sui generis. The rationale behind L/W includes the stimulation of rural employment opportunities, not just the removal of one person's journey to work. Otherwise dwellings in the countryside could be allowed for anyone who agreed to work from home (almost impossible to police) and would still potentially generate partners' trips to work, school run, shopping trips and all the other journeys associated with residential dwellings. I don't think you have to employ anyone else for a unit to be live work, but I do think that if a proposal is to be taken out of Use Class C3 and therefore the scope of policies, both national through PPS3 and PPS7 and local (most LDFs or local plans having restrictive policies on dwellings in open countryside) then the workspace element has to be more than ancillary to the dwelling.