The new academic year is just two weeks old for most students. Coinciding with the new year, rules came into place on the minimum room size for properties rented out as HMOs. This means rogue landlords can no longer continue to subdivide rooms or pack rooms full of bunk beds for adults to maximise the number of tenants in a property.
Why This is Necessary
In late September, around one week before the new laws came into place, housing enforcement officers found one semi-detached house converted into an HMO in London containing 35 people. That is not just in breach of the new laws, it’s also a danger in the event of a fire. This is not the first nor is it an isolated incident. There have been countless examples of rooms subdivided until they are just large enough to fit a bed inside shunted up against some cupboards. It’s an ongoing problem, especially in the capital, but some say the laws don’t quite go far enough.
In High Barnet, developers converting a 19th-century building into bedsits have come up against fierce opposition due to the sizes at which they wish to segregate the flats. Comments have included the belief that it would lead to slums and we would never allow animals to live in such small spaces, so why humans?
What are the Minimum Room Sizes?
From 1st October, larger flats and houses of 1 or 2 storeys converted into HMOs designed for living space of 5 or more people (the typical size for student accommodation) will come under previous mandatory licensing laws that already applied elsewhere. The government estimates that a further 160,000 properties will now come under the mandatory licensing scheme. In all, around 220,000 will now be subject to these laws in England and Wales.
At the same time, minimum room sizes in such HMOs will change. Rooms designed for sleeping one adult must be 6.51m2 while those for couples or require space no smaller than 10.22 m2. Landlords should already have been aware of this and it will not affect the vast majority of student tenants or their properties. However, these are the national statutory minimum. If councils wish to take a decision to set a higher minimum, they can. In the case of the conversion in High Barnet where the minimum for a single person is 10m2, they do fit this minimum.
Other Information
The government and councils will be monitoring the situation. Concern over what to do with so-called “box rooms”, often small former children’s rooms used as temporary accommodation for visitors in residential homes is one of them. It could be that landlords may wish in future to take space away from larger rooms to ensure that these reach minimum standards.