Takeaway to two flats under Class M: an illustrative pack

A hot food takeaway can become dwellings under Class M without a full planning application, provided the floorspace changing use stays within 150 m² and the building was in a qualifying use on 20 March 2013. What follows is an illustrative Class M conversion example on a suburban shopping parade, written to show where the evidence and the design effort actually go. The site, the figures and the outcome are illustrative rather than a record of any real decision.

The unit, the floorspace and the cap

The illustration is a two storey mid-terrace unit on a 1930s parade. The ground floor trades as a hot food takeaway at 88 m² gross internal area, including the servery, kitchen and rear store. The first floor at 52 m², has been used as staff space and dry storage as part of the same planning unit rather than as a separate flat.

That gives 140 m² of floorspace changing use, inside the 150 m² cumulative limit in Class M of Part 3 of Schedule 2 to the General Permitted Development Order 2015. The limit is cumulative, so any earlier Class M conversion in the same building counts towards it, and the first question on any parade unit is whether the right has been used before.

The scheme is two one bedroom flats, one per floor. Class M permits building works reasonably necessary for the conversion, and it does not permit any enlargement beyond the external dimensions of the existing building, which rules out the rear extension that would have solved the plan.

The unit in this illustration is not listed, not in a conservation area and not on designated land. Those exclusions in M.1 need checking first in the current consolidated order, because conservation areas in particular are treated differently from elsewhere and a desk check takes minutes.

Proving the use on 20 March 2013

The qualifying use date is the part of Class M that defeats applications. The building has to have been in one of the specified uses on 20 March 2013, or, where it was vacant on that date, when it was last in use before then.

In this illustration the pack carried four documents. A dated food business registration naming the premises as a takeaway. Business rates records with a rating description covering 2012 to 2014. A premises licence showing late night refreshment at the address. And a street view image dated 2012 showing the shopfront with trading signage.

Any one of those would have been arguable on its own. Together they place the use on the date beyond sensible dispute, and the officer's report in a case like this usually deals with the point in two lines. That is the outcome you want from an evidence pack.

The rating description is the document most likely to be ambiguous, because a parade unit can be described generically. Where it is, the licence and the food registration do the work.

The layout and the natural light problem

The ground floor flat is the hard one. A parade unit is deep, the shopfront faces the street, and the rear wall opens onto a small yard. Once you remove the option of extending, the deep middle of the plan has no prospect of a window.

The approach taken in this illustration was to stop fighting the plan. The bedroom went to the rear with an enlarged window onto the yard, the living space took the shopfront, and the middle third held the bathroom, the kitchen run against a party wall and the store. A rooflight was formed over the rear portion where the original single storey back addition sits under a flat roof, which is an alteration within the existing envelope rather than an enlargement.

Dwellings created under Part 3 rights have to meet the nationally described space standard, and a one bedroom one person flat needs 39 m² gross internal area, rising to 50 m² for one bedroom and two people. Both flats were designed as one bedroom two person at just over 50 m², which left the remaining ground floor area as circulation and store rather than as habitable space. Fewer, better rooms.

The shopfront itself needed rethinking. A full width glazed frontage onto a pavement makes an unusable living room, so the design took the glazing down to a domestic proportion with a solid panel below, a recessed entrance and a planted strip behind railings. Prior approval covers the works reasonably necessary for the conversion, so the frontage treatment belongs in the submitted drawings rather than in a later application.

Noise from the rest of the parade

A parade is a noisy place to live. The adjoining unit in this illustration is a barber with an air conditioning condenser on the rear elevation, there is a second takeaway three doors along with an extract flue, and refuse collection is early.

The submission included a short measurement survey covering a Friday evening and a weekday morning, internal target levels drawn from BS 8233:2014, and a glazing and acoustic trickle ventilation specification that met them with windows closed. A Noise Impact Assessment framed as measure, target, specification is three pages rather than thirty, and councils normally expect a suitably qualified acoustician to author it.

The condenser was the awkward detail. The new bedroom window sat 2.4 metres from it, so the specification had to be tested against that source rather than against the general ambient level. Those are the details that get missed when a noise report is written from a postcode instead of a site visit.

Refuse, cycles and the yard

The rear yard in the illustration is 4 metres deep, and it has to hold refuse and recycling for two flats, cycle parking and a drying area, while leaving a route out to the service lane.

The solution was a timber bin store against the boundary sized for the authority's collection containers, two cycle hoops in a lockable store under the rooflight, and the remainder kept clear. Yard capacity is the reason schemes of this sort end up as two flats rather than three.

Contamination, and the prior approval itself

A former hot food takeaway is not an obvious contamination risk, though parade units frequently sit on made ground and older fuel storage shows up more often than people expect. A desk study was submitted, following the approach in a Land Contamination Phase 1 assessment, and it screened the site out. Where a desk study does not screen a site out, the consequences of discovering it late are set out in a conversion where contamination was found mid-build.

Prior approval under Part 3 is determined within 56 days under paragraph W, and the development has to be completed within three years of the prior approval date. The approval in this illustration carried conditions requiring the acoustic specification to be installed as submitted, the bin and cycle store to be provided before occupation, and the works to accord with the approved drawings. A short Planning Statement tied the evidence together.

Where the time actually went

Not on the drawings. The use history took three weeks, mostly waiting on records. The noise survey needed rescheduling because the first attempt coincided with the parade being resurfaced. And the space standard check forced a layout revision that should have happened at the start.

Application fees for prior approval are set by the current national fee regulations and are indexed, so check the published schedule rather than a figure quoted in an older article.

This walkthrough is illustrative. It is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority 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. For specialist technical reports, qualified professional input may be required. Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which documents a small parade conversion is likely to need.