Class MA and the amendments that widened it

Class MA lets a building in commercial, business and service use become homes through prior approval rather than a full planning application. It sits in Part 3 of Schedule 2 to the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, it arrived in August 2021, and it has been widened since. The two conditions that used to stop most schemes, a floorspace cap and a requirement that the building had stood empty, were removed in March 2024. What remains is a two year qualifying use period, a closed list of prior approval matters and a growing patchwork of Article 4 directions.

Class MA prior approval is now the default route for a shop or office conversion in most of England. It is also the route that generates the most refusals for reasons the applicant could have anticipated.

What Class MA permits

The right allows a change of use from Class E, the commercial, business and service class created in September 2020, to Class C3 dwellinghouses. Class E is broad. It takes in shops, restaurants and cafes, offices, research and development, light industrial, clinics and health centres, creches and day nurseries, gyms and indoor sport.

That breadth is the point. A building that was a bank, then an office, then a physiotherapy clinic has remained in Class E throughout, and the changes between those uses were not development at all. For Class MA purposes it is the Class E status that counts, not which sub-use the building happens to be in on the day you apply.

Building operations are not included beyond what is reasonably necessary for the conversion, so anything structural or external usually needs its own permission. The right does not authorise works to a listed building, and it does not replace building regulations approval.

The qualifying use period

The building must have been in Class E use, or in a use that would fall within Class E, for a continuous period of at least two years before the date of the application. The predecessor uses from the old A and B1 classes count where they would now be Class E.

Proving this is where applications fail on paper. Business rates records, lease documents, dated photographs, utility accounts and accounts filed at Companies House are all used. Two years of continuous use means continuous, and a gap while the building was being refitted is usually accepted while a gap during which the building was let to a use outside Class E is not.

Get the evidence together before you apply rather than after the council queries it, because the 56 day determination period does not stop while you look for a lease.

The vacancy requirement and the floorspace limit

When Class MA was introduced it required the building to have been vacant for at least three months immediately before the application, and it capped the floorspace being converted at 1,500 square metres. Both conditions were removed by amendment with effect from 5 March 2024.

The effect was substantial. A trading shop can now be converted without a period of deliberate emptiness first, which removed a perverse incentive to leave buildings empty, and large office blocks came within reach of the right for the first time. Because a great deal of published commentary predates that change, read the current consolidated text of Part 3 on legislation.gov.uk rather than a summary written before March 2024, and check whether anything has moved again since.

The two year qualifying period was not removed. That is the condition doing the work now.

Prior approval matters in the closed list

Prior approval under Class MA can only be refused on the matters listed in the Order. An officer cannot refuse because the design is poor, because the scheme provides no affordable housing, or because the loss of a shop harms the high street, unless one of the listed matters captures it.

The list covers:

• transport impacts, particularly safe site access
• contamination risks on the site
• flooding risks
• the impact of noise from commercial premises on the future residents
• where the building is in a conservation area, the effect of losing a ground floor commercial use
• the effect on future residents of introducing housing into an area the authority considers important for general industry, storage, distribution, waste management or heavy goods vehicle parking
• the effect on local service provision where a registered nursery or health centre is being lost
• fire safety, for taller buildings

Two further requirements apply to all Part 3 residential conversions and catch schemes regularly. Every habitable room must have adequate natural light, which rules out internal bedrooms with no window, and the new dwellings must meet the nationally described space standard.

Deal with the listed matters in the submission rather than waiting to be asked. A short Noise Impact Assessment where there is a commercial neighbour, a Phase 1 desk study feeding a contaminated land assessment where the history warrants it, and a Flood Risk Assessment where the building sits in Flood Zone 2 or 3, all supplied at the outset, remove the officer's easiest refusal reasons.

Fire safety became a prior approval matter for buildings above the relevant height, which overlaps with the wider regime covered in what the higher-risk building threshold changes at planning.

Article 4 directions over Class MA

Councils have responded to the widening of Class MA by making Article 4 directions that remove it, most heavily in town centres, primary shopping frontages and central London. A direction does not stop the conversion. It means you need a full planning application, with all the policy tests that brings back into play.

National policy expects Article 4 directions to be limited to situations where they are necessary to avoid wholly unacceptable adverse impacts, and to cover the smallest geographical area possible. In practice the coverage varies enormously between authorities, and a direction can be made with immediate effect in some circumstances.

Check for a direction before you exchange contracts. The council's website is the first place, the planning data service is the second, and a written confirmation from the planning department is the third. A building bought on the assumption of permitted development rights that turns out to sit inside a direction made last year is an expensive mistake.

Time limits, conditions and where a full application is still needed

Once prior approval is given, or the 56 day period expires without a determination, the development must be completed within three years of the prior approval date. That is a real constraint on a large building.

A full application is still the route where the building is listed or in the curtilage of a listed building, where it is a scheduled monument, or where the site is a site of special scientific interest, a safety hazard area or a military explosives storage area. The same is true where an Article 4 direction removes the right, where the qualifying use period cannot be evidenced, and where the works needed go beyond what is reasonably necessary for the conversion.

There is also a strategic reason to choose a full application even where Class MA is available. Prior approval gives no scope to negotiate, no ability to fix a marginal natural light problem through design discussion, and no room to argue policy. A scheme that is 90 per cent compliant will be refused rather than amended. Where a building is awkward, the full route is sometimes faster.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Permitted development rights change frequently, and Article 4 directions vary street by street, so check the current Order and the position with your local planning authority before relying on it. A Lawful Development Certificate is the only formal way to confirm that works are lawful.

Follow reform news on the UK planning law updates timeline. PlanScope drafts the supporting statements a prior approval submission needs, structured to UK planning policy, and reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.