A family home in North Bristol is set to be turned into a shared flat with seven bedrooms, despite neighbours’ concerns about noise and parking.
Councillors approved Redland Capital Ltd’ plans to change the semi-detached Horfield home into a seven-person house in multiple occupation (HMO) last week.
Members said they “understood” the concerns of the 21 people who objected to the application, but that their hands were tied by planning policy.
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The plans include the addition of a single-storey side extension to the 1930s two-storey house at the corner of Wellington Hill West and Bishopthorpe Road.
Just one off-street car parking space is provided.
Local councillor Phillipa Hulme said the conversion would “more than double” the number of bedrooms in the house, which would make life “really, really difficult” for neighbours.
“The HMO would be quite crowded,” the Labour member for Horfield told a planning committee on Wednesday, December 12.
“If you live in an HMO, you use your bedroom to entertain people, to work, to study, to listen to music, quite possibly late at night. People go out to smoke, for barbecues. So there would be a lot of ambient noise both for the immediate next-door neighbours who are adjoining and for quite a significant area around.
“Parking here is really, really bad because of Southmead Hospital, and cars zoom round that corner,” she added.
Richard Worsnop, who lives in the other half of the semi-detached pair, said the applicant’s plans to insulate the party wall would only “partially” block the noise from the HMO.
He said he was ethically opposed to the conversion of a “solid and good” family home into an HMO, and that the side extension would “unbalance a really quite attractive house”.
“With all the other buildings there, it’ll end up looking like a shanty town,” Mr Worsnop added, referring to a lockable bicycle storage unit and a bin store that are to be added behind the house alongside the off-street parking space which is currently a single garage.
A planning officer who recommended the application for approval told the committee that Redland Capital had scaled back its plans twice after they were first refused in May last year.
The revised plans met all of Bristol City Council’s planning rules, including a new policy to protect communities from a “harmful concentration” of HMOs, as well as the council’s HMO licensing standards, the officer said.
The HMO Supplementary Planning Document, adopted in November 2020, means HMOs cannot make up more than 10 per cent of homes within a 100m radius nor can they “sandwich” people’s homes between them.
“We didn’t feel that there was any policy reasons to refuse this application,” the officer said.
The council’s head of development, Gary Collins, told members the council would have “very little chance” of winning an appeal against refusal.
Committee member, Labour's Fabian Breckels, said: “I think given our chances of succeeding [at] an appeal are close to zero - I fully understand the neighbour’s concerns, I fully understand residents’ concerns - but if this meets all the criteria of the HMO policy we’ve just agreed, I think we’re slightly stuffed.”
The six of the eight-strong committee voted to approve the application. Two members abstained.
The committee added two conditions to the planning consent to ensure the fence dividing the HMO’s garden from the neighbour’s garden is maintained “in perpetuity” and to ensure the off-street parking space is reserved for occupants and not rented out by the landlord.
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