Can the Government’s new Office-to-Residential rules solve the UK housing crisis?

Andrew McEwan, Senior Associate in the Commercial Real Estate team, recently wrote an article for CoStar on the new legislation around permitted development rights and how it can assist the UK housing crisis.

Housing Secretary Michael Gove recently announced legislation to relax the rules around permitted development rights. New flexibilities came into force on 5 March and have been introduced to support office-to-residential conversions, a trend that has been gathering pace over the past few years.

The government has made the changes with the intention of creating a more favourable planning context to address the fact that a large proportion of office buildings are becoming obsolete (due to the twin effect of more home-working and tightening sustainability requirements) while we remain in the grips of a worsening housing shortage.

Office-to-residential conversions have, however, produced inconsistent results to date, and the latest changes are likely to be met with opposition from local authorities who continue to face a lack of funding which would help alleviate some of the delays experienced with the ‘traditional’ planning regime.

You can read the original article, published on 29 February 2024, behind the paywall here.