There is a fairly basic principle at the heart of our planning system: if you want to make a significant change to the use of a building, you should get planning permission before you do it.
That is why what has happened at the former Brighton and Hove High School Junior Department in Radinden Manor Road in my ward concerns me.
The building’s lawful use is educational. Yet it has been occupied as accommodation for property guardians, with a retrospective planning application – BH2026/00749 – seeking permission for its change of use to a 47-person house in multiple occupation (HMO).
Forty-seven people! This is not somebody turning a spare room into a bedroom or making a minor alteration to a house. It is a substantial former school building moving from an educational use to residential occupation by dozens of unrelated adults. And it happened before planning permission was secured. That matters.
I fully understand why property guardianship exists. Empty buildings can attract vandalism, squatting, theft and anti-social behaviour. Keeping a building occupied and secure can make good sense.
But those are property management considerations. They are not a substitute for planning permission. Nor should calling something a “meanwhile use” somehow make the normal planning questions disappear.
The applicant is now seeking temporary permission for two years while the wider site is sold and longer-term redevelopment proposals are developed.
That may sound pragmatic. But there is a much more fundamental question that needs answering first. What happened to the school?
Brighton and Hove’s planning policies protect educational and community facilities for good reason. Policy DM9 in the City Plan does not simply say that a community facility can be lost when its existing owner no longer wants it. There are tests.
Is the facility still needed? Is there suitable alternative provision? Could the building accommodate another community use? Has there been proper marketing to establish whether anybody else might want it for education or community purposes?
Those questions matter particularly in a city where land and buildings suitable for schools, nurseries, health, community and other public-serving uses are extraordinarily difficult to replace once they have gone, demonstrating that Brighton and Hove no longer needs the facility. That distinction is important.
There is also something rather odd about the case now being put forward.
On the one hand, we are being told that the school building is no longer required for its educational use. On the other, the applicant has suggested that, after two years, the HMO use should cease and the building should revert to its previous lawful use. That previous lawful use is education. So which is it?
If the building can realistically return to educational use in two years, why have we established that it cannot serve an educational or other community purpose now?
And if there is no realistic prospect of it returning to education, what exactly does a condition requiring it to “revert” achieve?
These are questions that deserve proper answers before any permission is granted.
Then there is the scale of the proposed HMO. A 47-person HMO is not an insignificant residential use. Forty-seven unrelated adults potentially mean 47 different working patterns, movements, visitors, deliveries, taxis and private hire vehicles, waste requirements and patterns of activity.
A school, of course, also generates significant activity. But its pattern is very different: predominantly daytime, structured and concentrated around the school day and school terms. Residential occupation operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
That does not automatically mean that an HMO is unacceptable. It does mean that the impact has to be properly assessed rather than brushed aside by the council because the residents are described as “property guardians”.
A management company, a head guardian, monthly inspections and a maintenance app may all be perfectly sensible management arrangements. But planning permission is about the use of land and buildings.
The question for planners and the planning committee when this applications comes before it must therefore be whether a 47-person HMO is an appropriate use of this building in this location, not whether the current management company appears capable of running it.
And then we come to the issue that troubles me most: enforcement. Planning enforcement is discretionary.
Councils do not have to reach immediately for an enforcement notice whenever a breach occurs and there are perfectly legitimate circumstances in which officers can invite somebody to submit a retrospective application. But discretion should not mean silence.
We need to know when the council first became aware that people were living in the former school. We need to know when officers considered that the material change of use had occurred.
Was an enforcement case opened? Was the breach investigated? What consideration was given to taking action? Why was the residential occupation allowed to continue while the retrospective application was being considered? Those are reasonable questions.
They are not about punishing the people currently living there. They are about integrity of the planning process.
Because there is a danger with retrospective applications that once a development has happened and people are living in it, the conversation subtly changes.
Instead of asking “Should we allow this development?” we can find ourselves asking: “How could we possibly undo it?”
That is a very different question.
The fact that this HMO already exists must not give the applicant an advantage. The application should be judged on exactly the same planning merits as it would have been had permission been sought before a single resident moved in.
Professor Samer Bagaeen is an Independent councillor for Westdene and Hove Park on Brighton and Hove City Council.
