What the 2020 Use Classes reform did to retail policy

The Class E use class reform of 1 September 2020 did something councils are still working around. It abolished the shop, financial services, restaurant, office and most institutional use classes and folded them into a single Class E, inside which a change of use is not development at all. A unit that was a shop can become an office, a gym, a nursery or a dental practice without any application. For retail policy, which had been built on the assumption that a shop stays a shop unless someone asks, that removed the main lever.

What Class E brought together

The Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2020 revoked Classes A1, A2, A3, B1, D1 and D2, and created Class E, commercial, business and service. Its sub-paragraphs cover, in outline:

• E(a) retail sale or display of goods, other than hot food
• E(b) sale of food and drink mostly consumed on the premises
• E(c) financial, professional and other appropriate services in a commercial, business or service locality
• E(d) indoor sport, recreation or fitness, excluding motorised vehicles and firearms
• E(e) medical or health services, other than those attached to a consultant's home
• E(f) creche, day nursery or day centre
• E(g) offices, research and development, and light industrial processes that can be carried on in a residential area without detriment to amenity

Because article 3(1) of the Order treats a change within the same class as not involving development, movement between all of those is free. General industrial and storage and distribution stayed where they were as Classes B2 and B8. The institutional and community uses split into Class F1, learning and non-residential institutions, and Class F2, local community.

Class F2(a) is the sub-class most retail people miss. It covers a shop mostly selling essential goods including food, where the floor area does not exceed 280 m² and there is no other such facility within 1,000 metres. A village shop can therefore sit in F2 rather than E, which changes what it can become later.

The uses that went sui generis

Pubs, drinking establishments, hot food takeaways, cinemas, concert halls, bingo halls, dance halls and live music venues are all sui generis. That was presented as protection, and in practice it is. Nothing can become a pub or a takeaway without permission, and a pub cannot become anything else without permission either.

It cuts the other way for occupiers. A former pub is not in Class E, so converting it to a café needs a planning application even though a café is an ordinary high street use. The same applies to a former takeaway becoming a sandwich shop. And a café in E(b) that starts selling mostly hot food to take away has drifted into sui generis territory without anyone filling in a form, which is where enforcement cases begin.

Conditions that freeze a superseded class

This is the part that catches tenants and their agents. The reform did not rewrite the planning permissions granted before it. A condition imposed in 2014 restricting a unit to Class A1 continues to bite, and it is read by reference to the class as it stood when the condition was imposed. The unit is still frozen as a shop.

So the free movement within Class E only exists where nothing else constrains the use. Retail parks, town centre schemes and mixed use blocks are full of conditions of exactly this kind, imposed to control the retail mix, and every one of them survives. Removing or varying such a condition means an application under section 73, which is a planning decision on its merits and can be refused.

Check the planning history of the unit, not just the current use. A decision notice from twenty years ago is the document that decides whether you need permission.

What it did to town centre policy and monitoring

Local plan policies that allocated frontages by use class lost their mechanism overnight. A primary shopping frontage policy that restricted ground floors to A1 has nothing to restrict, because every use it was trying to exclude is now in the same class as the use it was trying to protect.

Authorities responded in three ways. Article 4 directions removing permitted development rights, most commonly the residential conversion right. Conditions on new permissions restricting use to a named sub-paragraph of Class E, which is lawful and is now standard drafting in centre schemes. And plan policies framed around character, active frontage and unit size rather than use class. How authorities are reshaping this in new plans runs through the wider changes in local plan reform under the 2023 Act.

The sequential and impact tests survive untouched, because they apply to applications for main town centre uses in edge and out of centre locations. A Retail Impact Assessment is still required above the national floorspace threshold or a lower locally set one, and the current Framework carries the policy under its new policy coded structure, explained in reading the 2026 Framework.

Monitoring is the quieter casualty. Councils can no longer count changes of use in a centre from their own decision records, because most of them no longer generate a decision.

The permitted development routes out of Class E

Class MA of Part 3 of Schedule 2 to the General Permitted Development Order 2015 allows a building in Class E to become dwellings through prior approval, subject to conditions. The building must have been in Class E use for at least two years, must have been vacant for at least three continuous months before the application, and the floor space changing use must not exceed 1,500 m². Listed buildings, scheduled monuments, sites of special scientific interest and safety hazard areas are excluded, and conservation areas attract extra scrutiny on the loss of ground floor commercial use.

Many authorities have made article 4 directions withdrawing Class MA in their centres, so check the local position before assuming the route exists. Read the current consolidated Order rather than a summary, because Part 3 has been amended repeatedly since 2020.

Proving a lawful use after the change

With A1, A2 and A3 gone, establishing what a unit lawfully is means establishing what it was being used for at a date, then mapping that use onto the current classes. Rates records, leases, photographs, licensing records and utility accounts all help.

Where a use has been carried on in breach of control for long enough it becomes immune from enforcement, and the time limits were extended by the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, so read how enforcement time limits moved to ten years before relying on an old assumption. A lawful development certificate under section 191 or 192 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 is the only formal way to confirm the position, and on a unit you are about to fit out it is money well spent.

Checks before you sign a lease

Four questions, in this order. Is the lawful use within Class E, or is it sui generis. Is there a condition on any permission affecting the unit that restricts the use to a superseded class. Is the use you intend actually inside Class E, remembering that hot food takeaway and drinking establishment are not. And is there an article 4 direction covering the address.

If all four come back clear, your change of use needs no application, and physical works are a separate question. Extraction, flues, shopfronts, signage and hours all need their own consents, and a restaurant fit-out usually needs more of them than the change of use ever would.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it, and read the current consolidated text of the Use Classes Order and the General Permitted Development Order on legislation.gov.uk. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.