Advice on Planning Permission

[Bee11]

Wondering if anyone has been through a similar situation and could provide some advice please! I want to use my spare bedroom for a wax salon: no building work or structural changes; the room would still be used as our guest bedroom with a sofa bed; our home would remain predominately a private residence; the hours would be part time and wouldn’t be abnormal times for a residential area; I’d only have one client at a time, with time in between clients also so there wouldn’t be a crossover; I have a private driveway where clients could park; there wouldn’t be any marked increase in traffic or deliveries or anything like that which could affect neighbours; I wouldn’t have any signage or physical advertising.

From everything I have researched on gov.uk and the planning permission website, I shouldn’t need planning permission for this as there is no material change of use to the building (it stays a private residence first, a business second). However when I called up the council to run it past them the lady on the phone said I would need to apply for planning permission, including to-scale drawings from an architect of my property and the whole street! This would be a very expensive process before even setting up the business

Has anyone else gone through this? Did you go down the planning permission route?

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated as it could ruin all my plans and it might not even be accurate information. A lot of questions I asked on the phone she couldn’t answer and just kept saying I’m better off applying for planning permission.

 

[Trinity]

She's wrong, as long as the room can revert to it's original use without any structural changes you don't need planning permission. Technically all you're doing is putting different furniture in it.

Different councils have different requirements but you're not doing building works so cannot need planning permission

 

[BannerPenguin]

Can’t imagine you’d need planning permission but you’re likely to need council and mortgage company permission for a business from home. Also will likely need to let your home insurance know who may withdraw cover.

 

[Bee11]

She's wrong, as long as the room can revert to it's original use without any structural changes you don't need planning permission. Technically all you're doing is putting different furniture in it.

Different councils have different requirements but you're not doing building works so cannot need planning permission

Thank you, this is what I thought. Pretty sure the lady on the phone was giving me wrong information! I did more research into it afterwards and so long as the primary use of the building remains the same (predominantly still a private residence) then you don’t need to apply for Change of Use planning permission.

Thank you for your reply!

 

[Bee11]

Can’t imagine you’d need planning permission but you’re likely to need council and mortgage company permission for a business from home. Also will likely need to let your home insurance know who may withdraw cover.

Thank you yeah I was phoning the council to make sure they were ok with it, but the lady just kept saying I needed planning permission! Might see if I can find another department to call o see who I need to talk to. Thanks for the advice around mortgage and home insurance too

 

[TheDuchess]

Hi Bee11

Planning departments can be a nightmare and in the UK there isn’t any consistency between officers in the same local council department!

Local Councils do have the power to set their own rules, and beauty services (unlike hairdressing) are Sui Generis which means treated on a case by case basis. Some Local Councils are very relaxed about beauty and others are really pedantic and fussy. It’s worth finding out from your Council what their rules are for opening a beauty salon from commercial premises - find out if you’d need consent for a change of use. In my area beauty is treated like hairdressing especially if you work on an appointment basis, but other Councils have different rules.

If your Local Council are relaxed about you opening a beauty salon from a small high street shop, they will probably be relaxed about you offering beauty services from your home as long as the use of the property does not change materially and you do not create any nuisance problems with traffic, parking, noise, waste or smells etc.

Assuming you don’t need to make a Sui Generis planning use application to trade from commercial premises, you will probably be fine working from home as you plan to do. If I was in your shoes I would do a bit of local research and make a note of other businesses operating from private homes. I’d contact a business that wouldn’t be a competitor, located within the local Council area and contact them to ask if they had needed planning permission for their venture.

Assuming there are a number of similar businesses in the local area I’d just quietly set up and not bother the Council. This is exactly what I did in 2020. I spoke to the neighbours and asked them if they’d be ok (they were delighted) and I told all my clients I was complying with regulations by trading part-time.

I also told my clients that if it was successful enough to want to work full time, I’d have to apply for planning consent, but by that time I’d have a track record and would know if there had been problems and whether I’d get any objections. My clients are all professionals and they all seemed very happy with this arrangement.

As it happens I decided to go back to commercial premises and close down my residential venture as parking was trickier than I imagined and some clients seemed to be incapable of reading street names and house numbers and would roam around asking random people for directions and then get shirty on the phone with me, telling me they had no idea where they were so I couldn’t direct them! My core client base were happier in town, so I relocated.

I hope this is helpful