A soft play centre in a large retail unit

Soft play centre planning usually turns on a condition somebody imposed twenty years ago, not on the use class. A soft play operation is indoor recreation, which sits in Class E alongside shops, so moving from a shop to soft play is often not development at all. Then you read the original permission for the unit and find the use restricted to retail, or the goods restricted to bulky items, and you are into a section 73 application.

Check that first. Before the lease, before the fit-out drawings, before anything.

The use class and the condition on the unit

The Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987 was amended in 2020 to create Class E, which covers retail, food and drink, financial and professional services, indoor sport and recreation, medical uses, creches and day nurseries, and offices and light industry. Movement between those activities is not development, so no planning application is needed for the change itself.

Soft play is indoor recreation. A day nursery is a different limb of Class E, and if your business model includes registered childcare rather than supervised play with parents present, say so clearly in the application, because the parking and staffing profiles are different.

Retail park units almost always carry conditions. The common ones restrict the use to a former use class, restrict the range of goods that may be sold, or prevent subdivision. When the 2020 amendment created Class E, conditions on older permissions that referred to the previous classes continued to have effect by reference to those former classes. A condition limiting a unit to Class A1 retail therefore still means retail, and Class E flexibility does not override it.

Removing or varying that condition is an application under section 73 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. It reopens the planning merits of the use, which is where the rest of this article applies. There may also be a restrictive covenant or a landlord's user clause in the lease, and neither is a planning matter but both can stop the scheme.

Why the sequential test can still apply

This surprises operators. Leisure and entertainment are main town centre uses in national policy, in the same category as retail. A soft play centre proposed on an out-of-centre retail park is therefore a main town centre use in an out-of-centre location.

Where the proposal is not in accordance with an up-to-date development plan, the sequential approach applies, and the applicant has to show there are no suitable sequentially preferable sites in or on the edge of a defined centre. A Sequential Test for this kind of proposal has to deal candidly with flexibility on format and scale, because a large clear-span unit with high ceilings does narrow the options and that argument is more persuasive when the search has been done properly.

Impact is a separate question and only bites above a floorspace threshold, which is 2,500 square metres in national policy unless the local plan sets a lower figure. Many do. A Retail Impact Assessment for a leisure use looks at the effect on investment in and the vitality of defined centres rather than on trade diversion between shops, so a template written for a supermarket will not answer the question.

There is a counter-argument worth making. Replacing a long-vacant retail unit with an occupied leisure use can support the park rather than harm a town centre, and where the unit has been marketed without success the evidence for that should go in.

Weekend peak parking and circulation

The traffic profile is unlike retail. Arrivals cluster at session start times, dwell times run to two hours or more, and Saturday and Sunday are the busy days, which on a retail park means competing for spaces with the shops at their own peak.

Assess the weekend peak, not the weekday average. A Transport Statement that uses the right land use category for trip generation, reports the parking accumulation across a full weekend day, and shows the shared parking arithmetic across the park will answer most highway comments.

Circulation matters as much as the number of spaces. Families arrive with pushchairs and small children, so the walking route from the parking area to the door needs to avoid the service yard and any vehicle crossing point. Provide a short-stay drop-off area near the entrance if the layout allows, and show accessible bays close to the entrance rather than at the edge of the allocation.

Internal noise, party rooms and plant

Soft play is loud inside and, provided the building envelope is sound, usually quiet outside. The issues that draw objections are the plant and any external element.

Air handling is the main one, because these buildings need substantial ventilation and cooling for a large volume with high occupancy. Roof-mounted units on a unit backing onto housing need assessing under BS 4142:2014+A1:2019 against the night-time background sound level if the equipment runs outside opening hours, and against the daytime level otherwise. A Noise Impact Assessment should state the plant selection, the assumed sound power levels and any attenuation relied on.

Party rooms bring amplified music and loading at the end of sessions. Where there is an external play area or a terrace, expect the council to want hours restricted and to ask about the boundary treatment. Car park noise at closing time is a real complaint source on units close to houses.

The ancillary cafe and its extract

Almost every soft play centre has a cafe, and on a modest ancillary scale it does not need a separate consent. Councils still ask about the kitchen extract, because a fryer or a grill in a unit that was built for retail has no flue and no route to roof level.

Get the extract designed before the application. A Ventilation and Extraction Statement covering the system type, the discharge point relative to the roof line and any nearby openings, the filtration and the noise from the fan answers the environmental health consultation in one document. Retrofitting a duct up the outside of a unit after permission often needs listed building or design input nobody budgeted for.

Keep the cafe clearly ancillary in scale and in the way it is described. A cafe with its own street entrance and its own trading hours is a separate use, and an operator who applies for one thing and runs another invites enforcement.

Servicing, waste and the conditions to expect

Deliveries are light compared with retail, mostly food and consumables, so servicing is rarely contentious. Waste is heavier than operators expect, with high volumes of packaging and food waste at weekends, and the bin store designed for a shop is usually too small.

Councils reach for a familiar set of conditions on these applications:

1. Hours of opening, often with a later weekday close than weekend.
2. A cap on the cafe floorspace or a restriction to ancillary use only.
3. Plant noise limited by reference to a rating level at a named receptor.
4. Hours for any external play area, usually shorter than the main opening hours.
5. A restriction on the use to indoor recreation, preventing a later slide back to unrestricted Class E.

That last one is worth negotiating. A condition tying the unit to soft play alone reduces its value and makes any future change another application, so ask for wording that permits the broader indoor sport and recreation activity rather than one named business.

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 under section 192 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 is the formal way to confirm that a change of use is lawful. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.

Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which reports a change of use in a retail park unit is likely to need.