Amenity standards for bedrooms in shared and co-living

A bedroom in a shared house or a co-living scheme is judged twice, by two different parts of the same council, against standards that do not match. Licensing sets a floor area below which a room cannot lawfully be slept in. Planning asks whether the room has adequate daylight, outlook and ventilation, using guidance written for family housing. A room can satisfy the licensing minimum comfortably and still be refused on shared living room daylight standards, and that is the gap investors keep falling into.

Resolve both at design stage, because retrofitting a lightwell after refusal is not a small job.

The two regimes, and which one bites first

Licensing is a housing regime. For a mandatory licensable house in multiple occupation in England, the Licensing of Houses in Multiple Occupation (Mandatory Conditions of Licences) (England) Regulations 2018 set minimum sleeping room sizes as a condition of the licence, and the council can restrict the number of occupants of a room or refuse to count it at all.

Planning is a separate exercise carried out under the development plan. It considers the internal quality of the accommodation being created, the effect on neighbours, and the effect of the concentration of shared housing in the area. Article 4 directions in university towns remove the permitted change from C3 to C4, so many conversions need permission before either regime is reached.

The sequence that works is planning first, licensing second, building regulations throughout. Designing to the licensing minimum and then applying for permission is the sequence that produces refusals.

The licensing minimum room sizes

The 2018 Regulations set the mandatory conditions in plain figures. A room used as sleeping accommodation by one person aged over ten must be at least 6.51 m². By two persons aged over ten, at least 10.22 m². By one child under ten, at least 4.64 m². Any room below 4.64 m² cannot be used as sleeping accommodation at all.

Two details change the arithmetic on real buildings. Floor area where the ceiling height is below 1.5 metres does not count towards the figure, which removes a large slice of most attic rooms. And the licence itself states the maximum number of persons for each room, so a licence issued for single occupancy is not a room you can later let to a couple.

These are minimums for licensing, and nothing more. No council treats 6.51 m² as an acceptable planning standard for a new room in a purpose-designed scheme, and several have adopted their own higher figures in supplementary planning documents.

Daylight targets inside the room

The guidance planning officers use is the BRE approach, which was substantially revised in its 2022 edition to align with the European daylight standard. The move from average daylight factor to illuminance targets changed how new interiors are assessed, and our note on what the 2022 changes mean for new interiors sets out the mechanics.

For shared living the useful point is that bedrooms carry the least demanding target of the habitable room types, below living rooms and well below kitchens. That helps a co-living scheme where bedrooms sit on a deep plan, and it helps less than people hope, because the communal kitchen and living space then has to meet the higher target and is often the room pushed to the back.

Two design consequences follow. Put the communal space on the best elevation, not the worst, because the assessment will test it hardest. And avoid designing rooms that pass only when the target is assessed as a median across the room, since a room with one bright strip by the window and a dark two thirds reads badly on a plan and worse on a site visit.

Where the site is dense and the surrounding buildings are close, the flexibility available is real but has to be argued rather than assumed, and alternative daylight targets in dense urban areas covers how that argument is made.

Rooms lit by a lightwell or a rooflight

This is where most shared and co-living schemes lose rooms.

A bedroom lit only from a narrow lightwell receives a small patch of sky, and the vertical sky component at the window can be very low even where the room technically has a window. Rooflights perform differently: a horizontal rooflight can deliver good daylight quantity while giving no outlook at all, which is a separate objection.

Officers assess three things in these rooms. Daylight quantity, measured properly rather than asserted. Outlook, meaning whether an occupant has a view of something other than a wall at close range. And ventilation, since a lightwell can be a poor source of fresh air and a good source of noise from plant.

Where a room depends on a lightwell, widen it. A lightwell that is deeper than it is wide rarely produces an acceptable room, and the improvement from widening is larger than the improvement from painting the walls white, which is the mitigation applicants most often offer.

Communal space and its own requirements

Co-living schemes are assessed on their shared space as much as their rooms, and the two are linked: the smaller the private room, the more the communal provision has to do.

Councils look for the quantum of communal space per resident, its quality and daylight, the range of provision rather than one large room, the practicality of the kitchen arrangements for the number of residents sharing, and external amenity space. In London, the London Plan carries a specific policy for large-scale purpose-built shared living, and the Greater London Authority has published expectations that boroughs apply, so check the current policy text and any borough standard before fixing the unit mix.

Outside London there is no equivalent national policy, so the standards come from the local plan and any adopted HMO or shared living guidance. Ask the council for its document at pre-application stage rather than working from another authority's.

Basement bedrooms

Several councils restrict or resist bedrooms in basements, and the reasoning is consistent: poor daylight, poor outlook, flood risk in some areas, means of escape, and the difficulty of achieving adequate ventilation.

Where a basement bedroom is proposed, the case needs floor to ceiling heights that are generous rather than minimum, a lightwell wide enough to deliver both light and outlook, a clear escape strategy, and evidence on surface water and groundwater. The alternative, which is often the better scheme, is to use the basement for communal or ancillary space and keep the bedrooms above ground.

Do not assume that a basement bedroom which passes building regulations will pass planning. The tests are different and the planning one is discretionary.

What to submit on internal amenity

Give the officer a room-by-room schedule rather than a narrative. For each room: floor area, the area above 1.5 metres in ceiling height, window area and orientation, the daylight result, the outlook description, the ventilation strategy and the proposed occupancy.

Add a Daylight and Sunlight Assessment covering the internal daylight of the proposed rooms as well as any effect on neighbours, prepared by a suitably qualified author, since councils usually expect one and professional review is strongly advised. Then set out the licensing position separately, so the officer can see that the two regimes have both been considered and that the room schedule will not change once the licence is applied for.

A final practical point. Show the furniture layout at scale, with a bed, a wardrobe, a desk and a circulation zone. It is the quickest way to demonstrate that a room works, and the quickest way to discover that it does not.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority, the council's licensing team or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.