Flats proposal turned down as special office protections begin

Special protections introduced by the Royal Borough have defended an office building from being turned into flats – and mark the beginning of better shielding of Royal Borough office space.

There has been much conversion of office space into flats in Maidenhead in recent years, enough to cause officers and councillors alike to raise repeated concerns.

This is because of UK policies which the Royal Borough cannot override as a local council.

Currently, there are rules which favour developer schemes to convert offices into flats, making a smoother and faster pathway to create more housing.

Certain buildings with ‘permitted development rights’ (PDR) can be converted as long as they meet a nationally set checklist of requirements.

These cover basic living standards surrounding space, natural light, refuse storage and suchlike.

Only internal alterations are allowed – no external changes to the building or grounds.

Windsor and Maidenhead has lost hundreds of office units this way – between 2013 and 2023, about 36,000sqm of office floor space was lost, equivalent to about 2,600 jobs.

This was the fate of Mattel House, which, due to PDR, was always set to be turned into flats – no matter what Maidenhead's development panel wanted.

As such, the borough has been ramping up efforts to fight back since the summer of 2023.

This pushback came in the form of proposed Article 4 directions, which protect certain named employment sites from default approval for flats conversion.

Instead, applicants hoping to do this would have to apply via the full planning permission process.

Effectively this gives the Royal Borough more clout to say no, should the plans not meet its vision for development in the borough.

There are certain policies in the Borough Local Plan (BLP) and various Neighbourhood Plans that affect planning team decisions or recommendations to voting panels.

For example, if a scheme does not provide affordable housing, is not zero carbon, or does not include biodiversity net gain, the council may turn it down for not aligning with those policies.

Under permitted development rights, these local requirements do not come into play.

But Article 4 protections essentially cut off the PDR pathway for any property within a protected employment site.

In October last year, the Royal Borough’s cabinet voted to push for Article 4 protections at 31 sites in Windsor and Maidenhead, including Vanwall Business Park – the home of Mattel House and other lost offices, including the Costain HQ.

Now it looks as though these protections are up and running, since one applicant has run headlong into them.

Runnymede Borough Council (RBC) has been looking to turn Scandinavia House in Norreys Drive into 30 flats. This is next to Vanwall, in Concorde Park – also an employment site.

The applicant’s original plan was turned down in December because they did not meet all the points within the checklist of national requirements, which is fairly common.

Almost immediately afterwards, RBC submitted a second plan ironing out the kinks.

But despite the adjustments, RBWM still refused the application on a single ground: Article 4 protections now cover this site.