Employment to Residential Conversions - Article 4 Direction

What’s this about?

Are you a local business, concerned too many employment spaces are being converted into flats? Are you a landlord of an office or industrial space? Or anyone else concerned about these kinds of development? We want to hear from you.

Converting offices into dwellings has been automatically permitted by Government since 2013 through the ‘Prior Approval’ process. The Council proposes to adopt Article 4 Directions to take back control, in future requiring landowners to follow our normal planning processes. This should better protect our town centres and small businesses, whilst improving design quality. Do you agree with this plan?

Although this is a technical consultation on the proposal for Article 4 Directions the Council welcomes your comments on the conversion of employment spaces into residential dwellings.

Following confirmation of the Directions landowners will be required to bring forward such changes through a full planning process and they’d be assessed fully in relation to national, regional and local planning policies.

Tell me more:

We’ve been listening to the concerns of local residents and businesses and monitoring the changes taking place on the ground locally (Authorities Monitoring Report 2016-17 and Employment Land Study 2017). Such documents have identified the scale of the loss of employment spaces and the risk this poses to the economic future of the Borough. On the basis of this evidence we are making a case for removing this automatic right to convert employment spaces into residential spaces within our town centres and other key employment locations.

This will enable the Council to better manage where losses and changes to business space are appropriate.

Give us your views

We want to hear your views on what the Council is doing with this Article 4 Direction process. Do you think this is the best way to manage the loss of employment floorspace to residential ? Please provide your comments via:

• E-mailing: forward.planning@barnet.gov.uk
• Writing to: Planning Policy Team, 2^nd Floor Annex, Barnet House, 1255 High Road, London, N20 0EJ.

Feedback to the consultation will be taken into account by Councillors when they review and consider all responses at the Planning Committee meeting scheduled for September 2019, this will be a full 12 months after the Directions were made.