Self storage: which use class and what councils ask for

The self storage use class question has a short answer: a self storage business is normally Class B8, storage or distribution, under the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987 as amended in 2020. The longer answer is that classification is rarely what decides these applications. Councils refuse them over servicing, hours, and the look of a container yard in an open location, and they grant them where the applicant has dealt with those three things in evidence.

Get the classification right anyway, because it sets which permitted changes are available later and what a condition can restrict.

Where self storage sits between B8 and Class E

Class B8 covers use for storage or as a distribution centre. A conventional self storage building, where customers rent a unit and come and go with their own goods, falls squarely in it. The customers' visits do not turn the use into retail, since nothing is sold to them beyond boxes and tape.

That small shop is where the line starts to blur. A reception counter selling packing materials to storage customers is ancillary to the main use and does not change the class. A trade counter open to passing trade, selling to people who are not renting units, is a Class E activity, and once it is more than a minor part of what happens on site the planning unit becomes a mixed use. This matters because a mixed use has to be described as such in the application and cannot rely on the internal flexibility that Class E gives.

Van hire alongside storage is a further step again. Hiring vehicles is not within B8, and on many sites it has been treated as a separate sui generis element. If you intend to offer it, apply for it. Retrofitting it later invites an enforcement complaint from a competitor operator.

The practical test is the same one that runs through change of use cases generally: what is the primary activity on the planning unit, and what is only ancillary to it. The answer depends on floor areas, staffing, vehicle movements and advertising, which is how the planning unit is defined in any contested case.

Container storage: use, or operations, or both

Container self storage on open land raises two separate questions under section 55 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, and applicants often answer only one.

The first is whether there has been a material change of use of the land. Putting containers on a field, a yard or a car park for commercial storage will almost always be a material change, whatever the previous use was. Permission is needed for the change itself.

The second is whether the containers are buildings, which would make their installation an operation in its own right. The long-standing approach looks at size, permanence and the degree of physical attachment to the ground. A single container dropped for a fortnight is not a building. Forty containers on prepared bases, stacked two high, connected to lighting and intended to stay for years, plainly are. Stacking is the factor that most often tips the balance, and it is also the factor that drives the visual objection.

Apply for both where there is any doubt, and describe the containers by number, dimensions and stacking arrangement on the site plan.

Access, servicing and hours

Self storage generates low trip rates for its floor area, and that is the argument to make early. Customers arrive in cars and vans, dwell for a while, and leave. Deliveries by heavy goods vehicle are infrequent on most sites.

What highway authorities want to see is simple and specific: visibility splays at the access measured against the road's actual speeds, a swept path drawing for the largest vehicle expected, enough internal space for that vehicle to turn and leave in forward gear, and loading bays positioned so that nobody reverses onto the highway. A short Transport Statement covering those points is usually proportionate at this scale.

Hours are the condition most often argued over. Twenty-four hour access is normal in the industry and contentious next to housing. If you want it, support the request with the expected pattern of movements during the night, the position of the access relative to the nearest dwellings, and whatever physical measures you propose, such as a gate controller, directional lighting and a barrier that does not clang.

Visual impact in open locations

A container yard in a business park is unremarkable. The same yard on the edge of a village, or within the setting of a listed farmstead, is a landscape and heritage issue, and the refusal reason writes itself if you leave it unaddressed.

Deal with it through the site layout rather than through planting alone. Keep stacked containers away from the most open boundary, use a single consistent colour, and put the tallest structures against existing built form. Where the site is visible from a public right of way, provide views from that path rather than from the entrance.

Colour choice sounds trivial and is not. A dark recessive green or grey reads very differently in a winter landscape from a yard of mixed orange and blue units.

Hardstanding, drainage and contamination

Laying hardstanding is an engineering operation and forms part of the application. Councils will look at how surface water is dealt with, particularly where an open field is being surfaced for the first time, because the run-off rate changes immediately.

Expect to show the drainage approach in outline at application stage and in detail by condition. On a greenfield site the starting point is discharge at the existing greenfield rate, with attenuation sized for the storm events the lead local flood authority specifies, and infiltration tested rather than assumed. A drainage strategy setting out the proposed approach avoids a holding objection.

Where the yard was previously in industrial use, the land contamination position also needs a view, particularly if any part of the site will be used by staff for long periods.

Fire separation and what planning actually controls

Fire safety on a self storage site is mainly a matter for the Building Regulations and the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 rather than the planning application. Separation distances between container blocks, access widths for appliances and water supplies for firefighting are dealt with through those routes.

Planning still has a role where layout is concerned, because fire service access has to be designed in rather than added later. Show appliance access routes on the site plan, and say how the operator will control what customers store. Councils are increasingly asking that question after fires at storage sites, and a clear statement in the Planning Statement about prohibited goods, no electrical supply within units and no working in units is a reasonable answer.

Describing the use in the application

The description of development is the part applicants rush and lawyers later regret. Write it so that it covers what you actually intend to do, including the container element, the reception, any retail sales and any vehicle hire.

Something along these lines works: "Change of use of land to self storage (Class B8) including the siting of stacked storage containers, erection of a reception building, associated hardstanding, lighting, fencing and parking." Add the hours you are seeking if you want them established rather than conditioned.

Check the planning history of the site before you write it. A previous permission limited to a named occupier, or a condition excluding open storage, changes what you are applying for.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. A lawful development certificate is the only formal way to confirm that an existing or proposed use is lawful.

To see which supporting documents a storage site is likely to need, enter the site postcode on PlanScope and work through the guided questions.

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