‘Extremely poor’ HMO refused

A plan to increase the number of unrelated people living in one Spalding house to nine has been thrown out.

Mr D Bowden had applied to turn the four bedroom detached property in Stonegate into a seven-bed Home of Multiple Occupancy (HMO).
It would include two new bedrooms downstairs and a room upstairs halved to make it five rooms on the first floor.
Councillors panned a submitted survey which claimed there was plenty of parking spaces nearby but only during the evening with Coun Mark Le Sage highlighting there were six schools nearby.
Councillors who visited the site also said they’d seen rubbish being put out early.
“It’s not a planning matter but it seems to show how the applicant means to go on,” said planning chairman Coun James Avery. “I’m a bit concerned on the size of some of the bedrooms.
“One of them is the size of seven sheets of A4 paper.”
Coun Bryan Alcock said he could ‘only deduce to sleep you have to stand up’ in the smallest room while also pointing out the designs looked like two bedrooms had open toilets and a downstairs passage wasn’t big enough for two people to get through.
“If we’ve got to give permission for a property of this sort of quality to be put on the market and take people’s money it’s coming to a wrong thing,” he said. “They should think about the people living in them rather than cramming in as many possible while destroying a four bedroom house, the parking for which is bad enough on street.
“It seems an extremely poor development.”
Though planning officers stated the room sizes met current government guidelines, councillors refused the application on the size, the impact to neighbouring properties and the lack of car parking provision.