Permitted Changes of Use – FOURTH EDITION

“The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things” - in this case, the important changes to the GPDO that became necessary last year as a result of the substantial recasting of the Use Classes Order the previous year.

The extensive changes to the Use Classes Order in September 2020 were clearly going to be followed by consequential amendments to the GPDO, especially to permitted development rights for changes of use in Parts 3 and 4 of its Second Schedule.

This has led to the most radical shake-up of these provisions since permitted development rights for changes of use began to be significantly expanded from 2013 onwards.

The new provisions came into force on 1 August 2021, and the forthcoming FOURTH EDITION of A Practical Guide to Permitted Changes of Use will contain a fully updated text explaining these legislative changes in detail.

Some significant expansion of PD rights has been brought about, notably Class MA, which permits the residential conversion of the wide range of buildings in commercial, business or service uses that now fall within Use Class E.

A number of PD rights have now been removed. A few of these were simply redundant, as a result of both the pre-existing use and the new use now falling within one and the same Use Class, so that a change of use from one to the other is no longer development at all.

Others have been replaced by new or enlarged PD rights under other Classes. For example, the revised and expanded Class A now embraces previous PD rights under Classes A, B, C, D, E and F (to the extent that some of these have not been rendered altogether redundant by the revised Use Classes Order).

This has left a number of PD rights that have been removed from the GPDO altogether without being replaced in any way. These are defined as ‘protected development’, and their life has been extended for a limited period. All these former PD rights are identified in the book, and the transitional rules that apply to them are explained in detail.

This FOURTH EDITION of A Practical Guide to Permitted Changes of Use will be an essential resource for property owners, developers and their professional advisers, giving them a completely up-to-date guide to this increasingly complicated and much-amended legislation.

Publication is due in a few weeks’ time, and will be followed on 5 May by a seminar in London to launch this new edition. These Bath Publishing seminars have proved to be extremely popular, and spaces are already filling up fast.

So, if you want to come to the seminar (with a copy of the book thrown in) or you just want to buy the book by itself, all you have to do is to click on the relevant button on the left-hand side of this page, and you will be taken straight to the Bath Publishing website, where you can get full details of the book and the seminar, and place an order.

© MARTIN H GOODALL