LIFTING a ban on bedsits in Conwy is unavoidable says the council’s chief executive who claims houses of multiple occupation have a ‘function’.
As well as facing a £19m budget shortfall, Conwy is facing a homelessness crisis after it was revealed last year the authority has the fourth-highest number of people living in temporary accommodation in Wales.
Conwy’s policy is to automatically refuse all planning applications for houses of multiple occupation (HMOs).
HMOs are typically houses in which residents of no relation share kitchen and bathroom facilities and have been blamed for creating historic socioeconomic problems in towns such as Colwyn Bay.
Cabinet, though, voted to lift the blanket bedsit ban in January as a measure to reduce homelessness, prompted by several bedsit planning applications being overturned on appeal by the planning inspectorate.
Instead the council want to introduce a range of control measures.
But this decision was called-in last month by a council scrutiny committee, and the matter is set to be re-debated by councillors this month.
Now Conwy’s new chief executive Rhun ap Gareth has claimed the authority has no choice but to allow bedsits.
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Speaking in an exclusive interview with the local democracy reporting service, Mr ap Gareth said: “Specifically the HMO issue, that is a direct result of the policy we have at the moment which bars HMOs, which we’ve had numerous planning appeals (contesting).
“If you lose even one appeal on a policy grant, it is implying that the policy is not evidential based.
“We have to take into account what the planning inspectorate decides. So we can’t ignore that. There will be controls around those HMOs if they come through. It is not that you could put an HMO everywhere across the county.
“There are specific things in the policy that will prevent that, and of course, we must also realise that HMOs do have a function. They do allow certain people to have that independence of living, so there is a purpose, but (we need) the right controls. It is not a carte blanche. It is having the right controls.”
Measures proposed to restrict the number of bedsits include forbidding two HMOs sandwiching another residential property and limits on numbers in a specific area.
Mr ap Gareth then said the new local development plan was still at an early stage and the blanket ban a proposal yet to be adopted.
“Bear in mind, of course, this is just the beginning of the process,” he said.
“We haven’t even got a draft LDP. It is the evidence that is being collected to look at solutions to different housing problems, of which HMOs are one aspect.
“We have a policy at the moment that wouldn’t pass the test of the planning inspectorate, so we need to be doing something about that, and then we are putting forward something that would address that issue that would help resolve some elements of the housing problems we’ve had.”
He added: “But I would emphasise that with that come significant controls around numbers of HMOs and so on. The policy itself would obviously have to have elements of control. It is not about changing all sorts of properties to HMOs. That’s not the purpose.
“It is to have them in the right places in the right number of them, so there is not an oversupply of HMOs.”
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