Ground floor use mix
Use classes: EnglandEngland

Ground floor use mix in England: what the use classes let a plan control

The question. Which changes of use on my high street still need permission in England, and which do not?

England redrew its use classes in September 2020, and the redraw is the single most important fact about ground floor policy here. It did not change what a plan may aspire to. It changed how many of the changes on a street a plan ever gets to see.

The mechanism is the one every regime uses: a change of use inside a single class is generally not development and needs no permission, while a change across a class boundary does. Widen a class and you remove changes from the system. The 2020 amendment widened one class a great deal.

What follows is the shape of the current regime, the parts of it that still bite, and the confusion to expect from documents written before the change. It is England only, and the last section says what the other three nations do instead.

A high street, with the part this page is about picked out.

The frontages, and which of them a plan can still say something about.

Written for

Class E swallowed most of the high street

Class E, Commercial, Business and Service, covers shops, financial and professional services, food and drink consumed on the premises, indoor sport and fitness, medical and health services, creches and day nurseries, offices, research and development and light industry. A unit already in Class E can move between any of those without an application.

That is the whole of the change. A shop becoming a cafe, a cafe becoming a nail bar, a bank becoming a gym, an office becoming a clinic: all inside one class, none of them development, none of them visible to the planning system. A local plan policy that seeks to protect retail frontage from becoming food and drink is, in most cases, no longer aiming at anything.

Two further classes sit alongside it and are worth knowing because they are the ones people forget. Class F.1 covers learning and non-residential institutions: schools, museums, libraries, places of worship. Class F.2 covers local community uses, including a small shop selling essential goods where there is no other such shop within a stated walking distance, and halls and outdoor sport. F.2 exists precisely to protect the last shop in a village, and it is the one policy tool in the set that was strengthened rather than weakened.

  • The Use Classes Order, as amended

    legislation.gov.uk carries the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987 and every amendment to it. Read the amended version, not the 1987 text.

    What it misses. The only current statement of what the classes are. It defines the classes and says nothing about whether a change between them needs permission, which lives in a different instrument, so reading it alone will mislead you. Check the amendment date on whatever version you have open.

What is left outside the classes is where policy still bites

A use that belongs to no class is sui generis, and every change into or out of it needs permission. The retail-relevant ones are the uses local policy has always been most anxious about: pubs and drinking establishments, hot food takeaways, cinemas, concert halls, live music venues, theatres, bingo halls, dance halls, casinos and betting shops, launderettes and petrol filling stations.

This is the practical answer to what a plan can still do. A policy resisting a concentration of hot food takeaways near a school is aiming at a real consent, because every new takeaway needs one. A policy protecting a pub is aiming at a real consent. A policy protecting a shop from becoming a cafe is not.

It also explains a pattern that otherwise looks like an obsession. If most of the high street left the planning system in 2020 and takeaways, pubs and gambling did not, then the surviving policy will concentrate there, because that is where the surviving lever is.

Permitted development, and the mechanism for switching it off

Beyond the classes, a separate instrument grants permitted development rights: changes that are development but are permitted nationally without an application, usually subject to a prior approval step where the authority may consider a defined and limited list of matters. The one that matters most for ground floors is the right to convert Class E premises to residential use.

That right has been amended more than once since it was introduced, and the conditions attached to it, including floorspace limits and how long a unit must have been vacant, have been relaxed. Do not rely on any figure quoted in a document, including this one, without checking the current statutory text: this is the single fastest-changing part of the regime and the version in circulation is usually a version ago.

An Article 4 direction is how an authority switches a permitted development right off within a defined area, so that the change needs an application again. It is the strongest instrument available for protecting a ground floor, and national policy expects it to be applied to the smallest area that addresses the harm, which in practice means a well evidenced frontage rather than a whole town.

  • The General Permitted Development Order, as amended

    legislation.gov.uk, as the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015 and its amendments. Schedule 2 is where the rights and their conditions sit.

    What it misses. Definitive and amended often, which is exactly the problem: an unamended copy reads as though it is current. Confirm the version, and read the conditions attached to a right rather than only the right, since the conditions are usually where the argument is.

  • The adopted local plan and any Article 4 directions

    The authority's planning policy pages. Article 4 directions are published separately from the plan and are easy to miss, so search for them by name.

    What it misses. Tells you what actually applies on a given frontage, which no national instrument can. Plans age, a direction may postdate the plan that justified it, and the boundary of a direction is drawn tightly enough that a unit two doors along can sit outside it.

England is not the UK, and the difference is not cosmetic

The 2020 amendment applied to England alone. Scotland runs its own use classes order with a different set of classes and no equivalent to the broad Class E. Wales did not follow the amendment and retains a class structure closer to the pre-2020 English one. Northern Ireland has its own order again.

The consequence is a real trap for anyone working across the nations. A Welsh authority can still write a policy distinguishing a shop from a cafe, because in Wales the boundary between them is still there to be written about, and the same policy in England is now aimed at nothing. Copying either way produces a document that reads as competent and does nothing.

So before quoting a class, say which nation you are in. If a report covers more than one, the class analysis has to be done more than once.

The short version

Where this goes wrong

Writing a frontage protection policy that Class E already defeated

A policy resisting the loss of retail to food and drink was a working policy before 2020 and is now largely aimed at a change nobody needs to apply for. It still reads well at examination, and it will not stop a single conversion. If the outcome you want sits inside Class E, the tool is not policy, it is an Article 4 direction or a lease.

Quoting A1, A2, A3, A5 or B1 in an English document

These classes were replaced in England in 2020 and are still quoted in templates, submissions and consultancy reports. Using them describes a system that no longer exists here, and an argument resting on the old boundary between A1 and A3 is aiming at a line that has gone. In Wales, by contrast, that vocabulary may still be the correct one, which is what makes the habit so persistent.

Trusting a floorspace or vacancy threshold you read somewhere

The conditions on the Class E to residential right have been changed more than once, and every relaxation leaves a stock of confidently wrong numbers behind it in circulation. Any figure of this kind has to be checked against the current order before it goes in advice, including any figure you find here.

The concept, without the jurisdiction

What a ground floor use mix is, and how one actually gets setA mix is a set of shares, not a wish list of tenants. Every jurisdiction gives a plan some control over it and none gives a plan much, so most of the lever sits in unit sizes and lease terms rather than in policy.

Other jurisdictions

Now do it

Or have it run for you

The mix you are writing policy about, counted rather than asserted

  • Every business inside a boundary you drew is collected with its category, which is the frontage count without the walk.

  • Categories are applied consistently across runs, so a monitoring count next year is comparable with this one rather than a fresh judgement call.

  • Review text across those operators is read rather than counted, so the evidence base for a policy includes what customers actually say about the street.

  • The regime is still yours to read. What this replaces is the counting, not the legal analysis.

What is the current mix on this frontage?

Area Analysis

The category mix with shares rather than counts, the rating distribution, and the themes recurring across the operators inside your boundary.

What would this operator add here?

Tenant Factsheet

One operator read against the area it would sit in: what it is, how its customers talk about it elsewhere, and which part of the mix it fills.

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